America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11

by Derek Chollet, James Goldgeier

When the Berlin Wall collapsed on November 9, 1989— signaling the end of the Cold War—America and the West declared Democracy and free markets had prevailed and the United States emerged as the world's triumphant superpower. The finger-on-the-button tension that had defined a generation was over, and it seemed that peace was at hand. The next twelve years rolled by in a haze of self-congratulation— what some now call a "holiday from history. "When that complacency shattered on September 11, 2001, setting the U.S. on a new and contentious path, confused Americans asked How did we get here? In America Between The Wars , Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier examine how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Wall on 11/9 and the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today. Reflecting the authors' deep expertise and broad access to key players across the political spectrum, this book tells the story of a generation of leaders grappling with a moment of dramatic transformation—changing how we should think about the recent past, and uncovering important lessons for the future.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, International Relations, American History

432 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2008

Reviews

[Brosnon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, must-read bedrock of foreign policy debates and debacles in the 1990s that continue to echo through to the present. Specifically insights about the Intelligence failures and military-civilian tensions that contributed to failures following 9/11, and international relations episodes that prove illustrative for many of today's problems. Presupposes a general knowledge of the events of the 20th century and key figures of the era, using this expository page space instead for deep analysis of nuances pertaining to the era's myriad conflicting developments.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well-written and reasonably concise history of USFP and domestic politics in the 1990's. Almost the entire book is about Clinton, and the author presents Clinton's FP approach in a clear and detailed way. Chollet effectively refutes the idea that Clinton had no framework for foreign policy. Clinton's framework was to use US power and resources cooperatively with allies and institutions to expand democracy around the world and preserve and expand the open international economic order. Unlike many scholars of Clinton's FP, Chollet shows the crucial role of globalization in Clinton's thinking and the importance of NAFTA, the GATT, and other trade negotiations (like the MX bailout) as parts of Clinton's grand strategy. He also shows that the GOP and conservative FP establishment was quite blind to the phenomenon of globalization as something the US needed to deal with in a foreign policy sense. They remained rigidly focused on classical interstate politics. For example, they had trouble conceiving of the terrorist threat as facilitated by globalization and openness, preferring to view it always through the state sponsor paradigm. This obviously conditioned their interpretation of and response to 9/11. One of Chollet's more interesting arguments is that if the right had picked up on these global changes earlier they would have responded in a more flexible way to 9/11 rather than immediately orienting the response within the state sponsor paradigm.

One really useful aspect of this book is its thorough and clear coverage of intra-party and intra-ideological disputes about FP. It really made me see the neocon project of the 90's as in large part an attempt to save the right from the internationalist ambivalence of the Contract Republicans and the net-isolationism of the Buchanan wing. On the liberal side, Chollet shows the running debate between anti globalization leftists and the Clintonite New Democrats. He also shows the raw partisanship of this period, even getting some Republicans to admit they really agreed with Clinton's FP in a lot of ways but blasted him for small mistakes anyways. Chollet's sympathies clearly lie with Clinton, but the book is unbiased enough to give a fair sense of the intellectual and political atmosphere in which foreign policy debates occurred.

I think this is the strongest history of FP in the Clinton years I have come across. It is interesting, relatively concise at about 330 pages, and pulls in factors like globalization and trade that are often excluded from histories of Clinton's FP. I'd recommend it to anyone looking to understand the 11/9-9/11 period better or who is studying any specific aspect of FP or trade policy during that period.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A satisfying history of American foreign policy in one of its most consequential, but also overlooked, decades in the 1990s. My biggest gripe is that it barely touches on a major player: the influence of corporate power in shaping foreign policy during the 90s. Otherwise, a good volume for anyone interested in how America's current foreign policy mess evolved over the course of a decade.

[Heather G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent

Really good, especially considering the author has an obvious political bias towards the end. Very informative. I was kid in the 90's so this was very interesting to make sense of what I heard adults talking about "back then"

[Will Morris IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly informative.

[Beatrix G-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastic book on American foreign policy of the 1990s (To me, a very interesting decade).
Lots of focus on intellectual movements and the marketplace of ideas @ the end of the Cold War.

[Michael R Dechant]

Eye opening!

If you want to understand how we got where we are after 2001, this is the book to read. Very informative and compelling.

[Barney · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is the legacy of 11/9 that we still live with today, as Republicans and Democrats try to define the direction the country should take." (xii)

This book is very good. I mean, really good. I felt I learned more about the current fucked up state of American Politics reading this than I have from any other source. Both authors are Political Science professors, the bibliography includes writings from across the political spectrum. Having watched both the Berlin Wall and the Two Towers come down on television, this book forced me to an uncomfortable pair of understandings.

1. The freshman that I will teach this year were born in 1997 or 1998. This makes them too young to ever remember the Berlin Wall, as it disappeared 8 years before they were born. It also makes them too young to have solid memories of 9/11 as they were three or four years old. The authors of the text convincingly argue that the great political debates of the 1990s are still very much extant; this makes me want to put much more emphasis in my teaching on the horrors of the Cold War and the importance of the Wall. The overriding questions about the use of military force in the 1990s were centered on States vs. Global networks. In a sense, they still are. In either event, I feel old.

2. This book features a President saying that the UN was "a light that failed" but willing to work internationally to solve problems. This was not Bill Clinton, but the first President Bush (7-11). It is shocking in reading this text how isolationist and conservative the Republican party has become in the last 20 years. This is most definitely not the party of Ronald Reagan, no matter how much they invoke him. According to the authors, the much derided Neocons were looking to invoke U.S. power unilaterally, but with a moral mandate. In this, they went away from George H.W. Bush. Democrats looked to a revival of "strength at home and the inevitable power of globalization." (42) I found this accurate, as most Neocons (Chaney, Wolfowitz, etc.) are actually closer on international issues to JFK or Harry Truman than they are anyone else. What emerges from these pages is the growing realization that the Bachmanns and Tea Partiers of the U.S. are the scion of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich himself was far more interested in foreign policy than his fellow "Contract Republicans" of 1994, but they got away from him. (108-110)

2010 was not the first time the Republican Party elected "a group of lawmakers who scoffed at the idea the U.S. had to be engaged in the world and...proudly declared they did not have passports." That describes the 1994 mid term election as well, the last time there was a cooked up budget fight. (109) This book actually makes me think that there should be four parties in American politics: Internationalists and Isolationists would be two. Al Gore was the biggest "hawk" in the Clinton Administration on two subjects. The first is Iraq and the second is terrorism. The Clinton Administration "deserves a lot of credit for taking the threat of terrorism seriously...but were never able to develop a coherent plan to deal with it." (272). While this has made Clinton a punching bag for numerous Republicans, the inference I draw from the text is that the Republicans who came into office in 2000 were woefully unprepared for al-Qaeda and focused on Iraq because it was what they knew.

It is this dichotomy that would form the other two parties: Statists (rogue states such as North Korea and countries such as China are the biggest threats) vs. Networkists (terrorists, global financial meltdowns are the biggest threats.) for example, Bush II would be in some ways a Isolationist Statist on foreign policy, while Gore was an Internationalist Networkist. The authors do not play what ifs, but the book raises great questions of the effect of 9/11 if Gore had been elected. It would have been vastly different; Gore was against the Iraq War in 2003 because of this split. Gore had been agitating for Saddam Hussein's removal or suppression since 1994; in 2003 there was simply no point to it. Overall, a very thought provoking text. Highly recommended.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 2008, the authors re-tell the history of the post-Cold War presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 as it pertains to the challenges of finding a new path for America and American foreign policy in the increasingly complex Globalized world that blossomed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The debates over threats vs. values, peace-dividends vs. global leadership, assertiveness and humility raged quietly in the corridors of foreign policy decision-makers while Americans generally indulged in domestic gratifications. The authors argue that 9/11 wasn’t a game-changing day, but the shocking wake-up to a world that Bush 41 and Clinton had been grappling with for a decade.

Some of the issues regarding the politics of foreign policy within and between the Democrats and Republicans are still relevant as this presidential election season revives the debate on America’s role as galvanizing global leader, superpower, member of an international community is revived in the general public’s awareness again.

As a history I enjoyed it - especially as it parallels the events of the 1989-2001 world with the evolution of political thought toward foreign policy. A good book to start a discussion.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a refreshing history that steers clear of editorializing, cheerleading or any of the things that could have made this partisan pap. As the title states, this is a history from the fall of the Berlin Wall (11-9) to 9-11, and how in spite of what we think, 9-11 did not "change everything." The 12 years between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror were years where there was great struggle to determine what the role of the U.S in the world would be--how military and economic issues would shake out in the wake of the fall of Communism. Clinton does not get off easy, neither does Bush, but in revealing faults the authors also show how the U.S' Iraq policy in 2008 is really just an extension of policies that were already in place.
While I love a good book that gleefully trashes the current administration, I really benefited more from this type of history that puts the present into perspective.

[Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book on American foreign policy between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Gives a balanced assessment of Democratic and Republican engagement in the conflicts and foreign policy issues of the decade. The only fault I found was the authors give Clinton a bit of a pass when it comes to his administration's reluctance to authorize covert direct action missions by JSOC or CIA in pursuit of Bin Laden in '98 and '99. The authors did an excellent job of highlighting the evolution of Clinton's foreign policy approach and the shared foreign policy goals of many on the left and right.

[Nicholas Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic overview of a little considered and little understood decade. This is a fascinating tour of US foreign policy between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the World Trade Centre and filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge and helped make sense of the policy taken in the 2000's. Because of the focus being on foreign policy there was sometimes either an absence of detail on what was happening domestically or assumptions made as to the depth of the readers knowledge but these are minor niggles in an enjoyable read.

[Dave N · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting thesis on the mismanagement of American foreign policy after the end of the Cold War. I don't know that I agree with the conclusions, but it's a good historical summary and it gives you a lot to think about, especially when analyzing Clinton's foreign policy. (The Bush section is lighter and many of the criticisms therein have been explored elsewhere, but the Clinton perspective was new, at least to me.)

[Joel Haas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough reflection of the time considered to be everything from the end of history to the rise of globalism.

The first Bush and (first?) Clinton administration's evolving views and actions as well as relationships globally and to the military are discussed in depth in an appealing historical dryness.

[Keith Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about US foreign policy. It didn't really lead to any conclusion, though. After talking with the author I get the feeling that it was a history book. It was interesting to see the development of the Iraq conflict from Bush to Clinton to Bush, though.

[Claudio Sultana · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a student that wanted to learn more about America foreign policy this book went into great detail and explained in clear terms the consequences of the decisions that were taken and the debates behind each decision. I would recommend this book.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic history lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers. Eye-opening, well-researched, and eerie!

[Barb Nuttall Pramick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"a great overview of American foreign policy as we moved from the Cold War to the War on Terror "

[Xavier Rauscher · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the greatest books on post-Cold War American Foreign Policy. Truly enlightening.

[Steven Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling look at a fascinating period of time. Though I do not agree with the authors' politics (which can be seen in the book), I enjoyed and learned much from reading this work.