why prudent politicians in Washington were disinclined to rush to the drawing board –
or, increasingly, to the computer – for the purpose of designing a new world order.
President Bush Snr was expert, and interested, in foreign affairs, but he and his senior
advisers were mechanics of diplomacy, not designers of grand schemes. His successor,
Bill Clinton, was neither knowledgeable about, nor much interested in, issues of national
and international security. The motto for his successful 1992 election campaign was ‘It’s
the economy, stupid!’ Nothing in the outside world seemed to matter very much to post-
Cold War America. The United States intervened for humanitarian reasons in Somalia
in 1993 (see the next section for full details), but retreated with almost indecent haste
when some of its soldiers were killed. In a replay of the last period of interwar history,
the following year American forces – 20,000, to be precise – intervened in Haiti. Their
mission was to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power and, hopefully as a consequence,
choke off the flow of Haitian America-bound refugees. The subsequent sad history of
Haiti demonstrates the practical limits upon America’s ability to enforce democratic
practices in a non-permissive political context. In the former Yugoslavia the United States
took action when it was all but obliged to as a consequence of the failure of other
agencies, notably the UN and the European Union. In 1995, US air power was wielded
to coerce the Bosnian Serbs; then, again belatedly and reluctantly, in 1999 it was
employed against Serbia itself over its mistreatment of the Albanian majority in its
province of Kosovo.
So, as can be seen from the above examples, the United States was hardly inactive on
the world stage in the 1990s, but its behaviour generally was reactive, episodic and not
especially determined in the face of any opposition. It favoured and sponsored NATO’s
eastward expansion, contrary to Secretary of State James Baker’s explicit promise to
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989. But the reasons behind this policy were never explained
clearly and coherently. Clinton wanted America to be a force for good in the world.
After all, he was the contemporary banner-carrier for American values. He favoured
human rights, international cooperation, multilateral rather than unilateral international
action, freer trade and the spread of democracy. However, in the 1990s the rhetoric of the
national security policy of the world’s only superpower was quintessentially vague.
Appropriately enough, the strategy of the Clinton administration bore the official, if
rather opaque, title ‘Engagement and Enlargement’ (Clinton, 1994). To be fair, that vague
American strategy was entirely appropriate to the way in which people at the time, and
not only Americans, regarded the decade. Those years were known as the post-Cold War
era, which is a no-name label. In other words, the 1990s were identified and characterized
negatively, for what they were not – years of Cold War. Only an American political leader
of extraordinary vision and energy might have succeeded in engaging the country in a
serious bid to build a new world order. Moreover, such a bid probably would have failed
anyway. As it happened, no such person was at the helm of US policy in the 1990s. For
that policy to register a radical shift, the political and strategic contexts had to change
markedly. They did with 9/11, which brought the post-Cold War era to an explosive
conclusion.
224 War, peace and international relations