initially on the very day that Iraq invaded Kuwait. But he was not a man much enthralled
by what he referred to dismissively as ‘the vision thing’. His administration was cautious,
businesslike, but emphatically not well peopled with potential political engineers for
the construction of a new world order. The Cold War was no more, though Russia’s
future remained uncertain, but peace had not exactly broken out all over. Quite the
contrary.
As will be discussed more fully in the next section, the 1990s were blighted bloodily
by a series of wars. In the Balkans, the Wars of Yugoslavian Succession marred the entire
decade. A book such as this focuses near-exclusively upon the major currents of strategic
history, and particularly upon the principal conflicts and their consequences. However,
there are nearly always lesser wars in the turbulent wake of a great war. So massive is the
social and political upheaval created by a major war, and so radical a shift in the strategic
context is wrought by its conclusion, that opportunity knocks for a host of actors who
seek to exploit what they believe is their strategic moment. For example, more people
died in the wars that immediately succeeded World War I, some of them ironically called
‘civil’, than had perished in the Great War itself. The 1990s, similarly, was not to be a
peaceful decade.
The United States alone had a convincing global military reach, though the British and
French could, and did, manage interventions on a minor scale. But with the Soviet Union,
now Russia, off the gaming board of global politics, why and where should America
intervene? Global reach is nice to have, but to what purpose? Without a Soviet enemy,
indeed without any significant foe, US foreign policy and its military backstop were
suddenly bereft of navigational guidance. The post-Cold War world was distressingly
populated with outbreaks of organized violence, mainly of a character internal to states
and would-be states. But none of those eruptions of warfare, in the Balkans and Africa
pre-eminently, touched upon American vital interests. In the absence of a context of Cold
War, virtually no local quarrel had the potential to ignite a perilous powder trail to a
World War III. It was paradoxical that at the very moment in history when the American
superpower enjoyed the utmost discretion over its potential resort to force, it was also
maximally disinclined to exercise its unique military prowess. This was because there
were hardly any violent disputes about which Americans really cared.
This text has already commented upon the injustice of hindsight. The facts of
American political and strategic behaviour in the 1990s are not in any way remarkable.
It is easy to argue that the victor, or maybe simply the superpower survivor, of the Cold
War ought to have had a vision of a new world order. With knowledge of 9/11 and what
followed, it is tempting to apply retrospective wisdom and identify steps that should have
been taken in the 1990s but were not. If those steps had been taken, al Qaeda might well
have been stifled early in its career. Readers must judge for themselves whether the Bush
Snr era (1989–93) and, especially, the eight years of the Bill Clinton administration
(1993–2001) should be regarded as periods of lost opportunity.
A political vision of a new world order requires a political visionary, and the United
States was not governed by a political visionary in the 1990s. More to the point, events
were not sufficiently challenging to produce the man or woman who could rise to the
challenge presented by an hour of high peril or high promise. Plainly, the demise of the
Soviet Union did not qualify as an event that provided such a challenge. Given the fact
that Russia remained politically intact and heavily nuclear armed, it is understandable
After the Cold War: an interwar decade 223