Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order

By Hal Brands

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America’s global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War had ended with Washington and its allies triumphant; democracy and free markets were spreading like never before. The United States was now enjoying its "unipolar moment"—an era in which Washington faced no near-term rivals for global power and influence, and one in which the defining feature of international politics was American dominance. How did this remarkable turnaround occur, and what role did U.S. foreign policy play in causing it? In this important book, Hal Brands uses recently declassified archival materials to tell the story of American resurgence.

Brands weaves together the key threads of global change and U.S. policy from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, examining the Cold War struggle with Moscow, the rise of a more integrated and globalized world economy, the rapid advance of human rights and democracy, and the emergence of new global challenges like Islamic extremism and international terrorism. Brands reveals how deep structural changes in the international system interacted with strategies pursued by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to usher in an era of reinvigorated and in many ways unprecedented American primacy. Making the Unipolar Moment provides an indispensable account of how the post–Cold War order that we still inhabit came to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501703423

Book preview

MAKING THE

UNIPOLAR

MOMENT

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND THE RISE

OF THE POST–COLD WAR ORDER

HAL BRANDS

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Structure, Strategy, and American Resurgence

1. Roots of Resurgence

The 1970s and the Crisis of American Power

The Paradoxical Cold War

Human Rights and the Democratic Revolution

Globalization and Economic Renewal

Conclusion

2. The Reagan Offensive and the Transformation of the Cold War

Reagan, American Prospects, and the Cold War

Taking the Offensive

Success, Failure, and Adaptation

Reagan and Gorbachev

Blowback

Conclusion

3. American Statecraft and the Democratic Revolution

Reagan’s Democratic Evolution

Anticommunism and Democracy in Central America

A Historic Opening in Latin America

From Authoritarian to Democratic Stability in East Asia

Constructive Engagement and South Africa

Conclusion

4. Toward the Neoliberal Order

Reaganomics at Home and Abroad

Trade, Finance, and Policy Coordination in the Western World

Debt, Leverage, and Neoliberal Ascendancy in the Third World

The Market and the Middle Kingdom

Conclusion

5. Structure versus Strategy in the Greater Middle East

The Iranian Revolution and the Three Challenges

Persian Gulf Security and the Iran-Iraq War

The Travails of Counterterrorism

Radical Islam and the Afghan Jihad

Iran-Contra and After

Conclusion

6. The Dawn of the Unipolar Moment

The Bush Administration on the Eve of Unipolarity

German Reunification and the Shaping of Post–Cold War Europe

The Persian Gulf War and the Unveiling of Unipolarity

Primacy and Post–Cold War Strategy

Conclusion

Conclusion: Understanding the Arc of American Power

Key Themes and Conclusions

American Power and Policy in the Post–Cold War Era

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book’s acknowledgments are rarely sufficient to convey the extent of an author’s debts. I have become ever more conscious of that fact in writing this book. This book draws on research done as far back as 2004–2005, and on ideas that I have been mulling over for several years. It follows that I have racked up a daunting list of intellectual, professional, and personal debts along the way.

I have benefited from the assistance and guidance of archivists far too many to mention, and from the support and wonderful intellectual climate provided by my home institution, the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. I have equally benefitted from my interaction with individuals who helped me formulate, reconsider, and refine some of the key ideas in this book. An undoubtedly incomplete list includes Colin Dueck, Charles Edel, Eric Edelman, Jeffrey Engel, John Gaddis, Peter Feaver, Bruce Jentleson, Judith Kelley, Bruce Kuniholm, Melvyn Leffler, Peter Mansoor, John Maurer, Williamson Murray, Joshua Rovner, Daniel Sargent, Josh Shifrinson, and James Wilson. I am particularly grateful to Frank Gavin, James Goldgeier, Robert McMahon, and Jeremi Suri, all of whom read the complete manuscript and offered invaluable comments. At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy offered support along with insightful advice and was, as always, a pleasure to work with.

My greatest debts by far, of course, are owed to my family. Emily, Henry, Annabelle, and Dolly put up with a lot of long hours and authorial absentmindedness as I was researching and composing the book. But they were always unfailingly loving and supportive, and having them in my life has been the greatest inspiration I can imagine. They did more than anyone else to make this book possible. And so it is dedicated, with great love, to them.

Introduction

Structure, Strategy, and

American Resurgence

1979 was a bad year for U.S. foreign policy. At home, the country was being battered by stagflation and high oil prices, developments that raised fundamental questions about the economic underpinnings of American power. Abroad, the United States was suffering a seemingly unending train of setbacks and humiliations. From the overthrow of longtime allies in Iran and Nicaragua, to the seizing of U.S. hostages in Tehran, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the final collapse of détente, signs of American impotence and geopolitical decay abounded. Malaise was the watchword in foreign and domestic affairs alike; all around the world, it seemed, the United States no longer controlled events but was at their mercy. The principal developments of 1979 registered the continued decline in the nation’s international position, wrote one observer in Foreign Affairs. The impact of the events which have brought this decade to a close has been such as to make the fact of America’s decline very nearly a commonplace.¹

This perception of American decline was not simply a product of what had happened in 1979, but of what had happened in the entire decade before that. In many ways, the 1970s had seemed to represent the final passing of the international predominance that Washington had wielded after World War II. In the wake of that conflict, the United States had used its unmatched power to erect a postwar order that carried the distinctive mark of American supremacy. By the 1970s, however, that postwar order—and the supremacy on which it rested—were coming under serious doubt.

The Cold War was frequently feared to be tilting in Moscow’s direction, amid a major Soviet military buildup and a string of Kremlin advances—and American defeats—in the Third World. U.S. economic hegemony looked equally imperiled, due to fierce competition from Western Europe and Japan, and the massive vulnerabilities exposed by the oil shocks. Across the developing regions, an increasingly restive global south seemed to be in revolt against U.S. authority. And throughout the decade, from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the fall of Saigon and beyond, the United States had been buffeted by crises that ruthlessly revealed its weaknesses and suggested that its global influence was receding. Against this backdrop, it was hardly surprising that so many informed observers doubted U.S. staying power. During the mid-1970s, no less a figure than Henry Kissinger often deplored the erosion of America’s position and the paralysis of its diplomacy.² By the end of the decade, the warnings were starker still. The retreat of American power could become a rout, former Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger wrote in 1979. The trend could well become irreversible in many respects.³ The American century, Schlesinger and like-minded commentators worried, might be dying a premature death.

As we now know, of course, such predictions turned out to be inaccurate. The United States was not destined to see its global leadership slip inescapably away. On the contrary, by the early 1990s the country was enjoying an international supremacy so pronounced that it required an entirely new nomenclature: unipolarity.⁴ The world had become indisputably unipolar in a geopolitical and military sense, with the Cold War ending on U.S. and Western terms, the opposing Eastern bloc disintegrating, and America’s longtime global rival—the Soviet Union—in the process of outright dissolution. No longer were international affairs defined by a bipolar standoff between hostile strategic heavyweights. The new order, rather, had America as the world’s sole superpower—the only international actor with truly global reach, and a country whose unmatched military, economic, and diplomatic capabilities gave it a vast margin of power and influence over any competitor. If anything, that influence was poised to expand even further with the Cold War’s end, and the events of recent years had generally underscored, rather than undermined, U.S. authority in world affairs. The United States, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote, was now in a unique position, without experience, without precedent, and standing alone at the height of power.⁵

The world had become unipolar in an ideological sense, as well. The values and practices that Washington preferred were experiencing an unprecedented global ascendancy, as democracy and free-market economics spread far and wide. These liberal institutions were flourishing in areas where they had been weak or even absent only years earlier, sweeping across much of the Third World and broad swaths of the former Second World. Competing ideological models, by contrast, seemed to be in wholesale retreat before this relentless advance. The end of history had arrived, one U.S. policymaker memorably declared: the triumph of economic and political liberalism was so complete as to bring mankind’s ideological evolution to a close.⁶ Hyperbole aside, the preeminence of the U.S.-backed liberal model was striking, and the international system as a whole now appeared to be remaking itself in America’s image and to America’s advantage. It was, altogether, a remarkable and even stunning turnaround. In just over a decade, the United States had gone from the apparent decline of the late 1970s to the reinvigorated and multidimensional primacy of the post–Cold War era. Now is the unipolar moment, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1991; the core feature of global politics was U.S. dominance.⁷

In this book, I examine U.S. foreign policy from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, focusing on two fundamental questions about the arc of American power. First, how did the United States make this transition from malaise to renewed primacy in such a relatively modest amount of time? How, in other words, did a unipolar, post–Cold War order take form following the traumas and travails of the 1970s, and what role did U.S. policy play in forming it? Second, and more generally, what is the relationship between structure and strategy in shaping the global environment? To what extent are major changes in the international order driven by deep structural forces over which policymakers have little direct control, and to what extent are those changes driven by concrete strategy—the deliberate and coordinated use of national power to achieve major objectives—pursued by countries such as the United States? In essence, this book seeks to make sense of a crucial period of transformation and renewal in U.S. foreign policy; it also explores the broader issue of how American power affects, and is affected by, the larger global milieu.

To be clear at the outset, this book is not simply another study of the end of the Cold War, the subject that has heretofore dominated the scholarly literature on the period. The trajectory of the late Cold War does certainly play a central role in the story, and one that is informed by the new archival materials and secondary works that are continually enriching our understanding of that issue. This volume, however, opens the analytical aperture wider. It weaves the late superpower struggle into a broader story about the interplay of global change and U.S. policy in the making of the post–Cold War order, one that also gives prominence to subjects like international political economy, processes of democratization and political transformation in the developing world, and the rise of new global challenges such as terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. As I argue, these and other issues were all integral to crafting the contours of the unipolar order that emerged in the early 1990s. Taking this more holistic view is therefore indispensable to assembling the key pieces of the historical puzzle, and to grappling with the extraordinary changes under consideration here.

This more holistic approach is also what most distinguishes this book from the existing scholarship on the period. As the voluminous and fast-growing literature on the end of the Cold War indicates, historians and other analysts have begun to assess parts of U.S. foreign relations during the 1980s and the years immediately surrounding that decade.⁸ What has not yet been done, however, is to draw these various parts together, into the larger whole that is necessary to really make sense of the U.S. resurgence. The relaunching of American primacy from the late 1970s to the early 1990s was one of the most momentous global developments of the late twentieth century, and it can only be understood by examining international events and U.S. policy across a number of key dimensions. To the best of my knowledge, this book is the first to provide such a perspective.⁹

This book is further distinguished by the fact that it draws heavily on relevant archival material, much of which has only recently become available. Admittedly, the archival record on the years from the late 1970s to the early 1990s is not what it should be, and full declassification will not occur for some time. But the frontiers of declassification have progressed far enough that scholars can now use archival materials to study, in considerable detail, American policy on subjects from U.S.-Soviet relations to Persian Gulf security, and on episodes from the Jimmy Carter years through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. This book relies heavily on such documentation, gathered from presidential libraries and other U.S.-based collections and repositories. It also uses oral histories and interviews, the records of multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and a smaller number of foreign records relating to the policies of key countries with which U.S. officials interacted. Taken together, these records yield new insights on U.S. policy in a pivotal era, and they shed light on the relationship between volition and circumstance—between American strategy and broader global currents. By aggressively mining the emerging archival and primary-source record, this book offers a fuller picture of its subject than has heretofore been possible.¹⁰

At the same time, however, this book is necessarily limited and focused in what it seeks to achieve, and two disclaimers regarding scope and method may be useful here. First, this volume is not a full international history of world affairs during this period, but rather emphasizes how U.S. leaders perceived, responded to, and ultimately shaped global change. Telling this story, of course, requires appreciating the international environment in which American initiatives were situated and the policies of the countries with which U.S. officials dealt. Without such analysis, it is impossible really to grasp either the sources or impacts of U.S. behavior. Nonetheless, a complete global history of this period—one that examines in great detail the perspectives of all key nations and participants—is beyond the scope of this project, which remains essentially a study of American policy and strategy in a dynamic international context.

Second, although this book offers a broad perspective on American state-craft in the run-up to the unipolar moment, it is by no means a fully comprehensive account of U.S. policy. My approach here is meant to be more interpretive than encyclopedic—I focus less on covering all aspects of U.S. diplomacy than on emphasizing those aspects and themes that were most critical to the rise of the unipolar order. The result is an account that is necessarily somewhat selective in what it stresses and what it minimizes or ignores. But it is one that is thereby intended to keep the interpretation and argument relatively clean and clear, and to ensure that the analysis and evidence presented go straight to the heart of the story.¹¹

To relate that story, I focus on three principal stages of U.S. renewal. First, I begin by reexamining the 1970s, a period when several deep structural trends were starting to rework the international landscape in America’s favor, even as short-term events made it appear decidedly otherwise. Second, I follow the story through the 1980s. This was the crucial decade when U.S. officials—particularly the Reagan administration—increasingly perceived these structural trends, and exploited them through forward-leaning policies that restored American momentum and accentuated the positive forces at work. Third, I conclude by analyzing the climactic period between 1989 and 1992, when George H. W. Bush and his advisers wrestled with the final crises of the bipolar era, while also taking advantage of those crises to forge a post–Cold War order based on U.S. primacy.¹² Throughout this volume, my analysis is therefore on the way that underlying global shifts interacted with specific U.S. initiatives to foster far-reaching changes in the international system. Indeed, a core thesis is that the emergence of the unipolar era reflected a synergistic interaction between structure, on the one hand, and deliberate and proactive strategy, on the other.

I trace this process across six substantive chapters, organized according to the periodization and analytical approach just sketched. As I explain in chapter 1, the American renewal actually began in the 1970s, a decade whose history was far more paradoxical than it initially looked. The difficulties that Washington encountered during that decade were hardly imaginary, and they created pervasive anxiety about U.S. prospects. In doing so, however, they masked the emergence of three profound global trends that were beginning to shift the international environment to longer-term U.S. advantage. The Soviet Union was slipping into irreversible systemic decline, leaving it ill-suited for prolonged geopolitical competition and highly vulnerable to the Western counteroffensive that was gradually taking shape. Meanwhile, the onset of modern-day globalization was rejuvenating U.S. economic power, and setting the stage for the proliferation of free-market practices and ideas. Not least of all, the rise of a transnational human rights consciousness and third-wave democratization were starting to alter world politics in ways that would eventually prove quite beneficial to U.S. ideological proclivities and strategic interests. Amid the day-to-day crises of the 1970s, great historical forces were moving strongly in America’s direction, and laying the structural basis for a very different post–Cold War order.

To some extent, U.S. policymakers were even beginning to develop the approaches needed to make the most of those trends. The story of the 1970s was definitely not one of masterful strategy, and as chapter 1 makes clear, U.S. officials from Kissinger to Jimmy Carter often found themselves tossed about by challenges that were hard enough to comprehend, let alone control. What can be said for those officials—in the Gerald Ford and particularly the Carter administrations—is that they did progressively come to understand the more fundamental changes occurring in the world, and to start piecing together initiatives meant to adapt U.S. policy accordingly. The near-term record of those initiatives was not always impressive—Carter’s most significant efforts to promote human rights and democracy were catastrophic failures, for instance, and no administration could conquer global economic upheaval. But from the Cold War struggle, to the human rights and democratic revolutions, to the major issues of globalization and international economic relations, the initial components of more effective strategy were slowly, fitfully, and sometimes ironically coming into place. In this sense, the policymakers of the 1970s, although often frustrated in their own time, helped lay the foundations on which their successors would so fruitfully build.

In chapters 2–5, I take the story through the 1980s. This was the period when U.S. leaders truly began to harness the structural forces at work, so as to reassert national power and shape the international environment in highly advantageous ways. The Cold War, for example, was utterly transformed during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and in chapter 2 I contend that perceptive U.S. statecraft was a vital reason why. Even before taking office, Reagan had identified the weaknesses of the Soviet position and the possibilities for a concerted U.S. counterattack. During the early 1980s, his administration built on Carter-era programs to launch a multipronged campaign that pounced on those weaknesses and reclaimed the geopolitical high ground. From mid-decade onward, Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz then deftly intertwined pressure and diplomacy to elicit a dramatic easing of tensions on remarkably favorable terms. To be sure, U.S. policy toward Moscow was hardly seamless under Reagan, and his eventual successes were assisted enormously by factors such as the worsening crisis of the Soviet system and the innovative leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. But even so, the course of U.S.-Soviet relations showed that American strategy had become highly attuned to underlying international shifts, and that it was moving energetically to reap the rewards. The result was to help fundamentally alter the trajectory of the Cold War, and to advance that conflict markedly toward its triumphant conclusion.

The Cold War was not the only area in which structural opportunity evoked productive strategy during the 1980s. In chapter 3, I explore how U.S. policy capitalized upon another historic opening by empowering the democratic revolution. As early as the Carter years, American officials had argued that a more democratic, rights-conscious world would be one in which Washington was ideologically and geopolitically ascendant, and they had started more intensively (if not always effectively) to apply U.S. power in the service of liberalization abroad. Despite some significant early backtracking, the Reagan administration ultimately embraced the logic of democracy promotion with even greater fervor, and with far better results. Reagan, Shultz, and other officials pursued a strategy meant to seize upon and extend the moment of democratic opportunity. That strategy mixed long-term efforts to strengthen the building blocks of democracy, with nearer-term initiatives to bolster reformers and move authoritarian regimes toward political openings. Admittedly, the strategy was sometimes applied haltingly, and its implementation entailed unavoidable costs and compromises. But in case after case, from Latin America to East Asia and beyond, U.S. influence became a critical factor in assisting democratic breakthroughs, preventing authoritarian backsliding, and fostering a global climate in which American values and institutions were ever more preponderant. History is on freedom’s side, Shultz said; America had the initiative in the struggle to influence the world’s political future.¹³

It also had the initiative in the struggle to shape the global political economy, as I discuss in chapter 4. During the 1970s, major tectonic shifts had begun to create a more integrated world economy in which market principles were advancing and the United States was well situated to prosper. During the 1980s, U.S. strategy helped affirm those shifts and drive the neoliberal advance forward. The Reagan administration had always been committed to fostering a more open, market-oriented order, and over the course of the decade, that administration and the next one would develop the concrete policies and leverage needed to make it happen. After some first-term diffidence, Reagan and his second-term treasury secretary, James Baker, gradually built on the steps taken by their 1970s-era predecessors to renew international cooperation among the major developed countries and thereby smooth the frictions caused by globalization. The administration also managed a fraught relationship with Japan in ways that brought that country more deeply into the global financial system, and it catalyzed a new round of multilateral trade talks that would eventually deliver a far-reaching liberalization of world commerce.

If anything, the gains were more dramatic in the developing regions. Here, U.S. investment, technology, and policy figured centrally in the astonishing economic liberalization undertaken by China from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, in cooperation with the IMF and the World Bank, the Reagan and later the George H. W. Bush administrations used the Third World debt crisis as an aperture to encourage free-market reforms and push globalization into the global south. By the end of the 1980s, the neoliberal order was becoming more firmly entrenched from the First World to the Third, and the international economy was becoming progressively more reflective of U.S. interests. From geopolitics to geoeconomics, American statecraft was accelerating the pace of positive change, and moving the global system in a more unipolar direction.

This imposing record was a testament to the strategic acumen of U.S. officials, and especially to that shown by the Reagan administration across an array of surpassingly consequential international matters. Not everywhere were the trends working America’s way, however, and as I argue in chapter 5, events in one region offered an essential counterpoint to the favorable flow of world affairs and U.S. policy. In the greater Middle East, the late 1970s had seen the rise of three key countercurrents that generally cut against U.S. interests: chronic and growing instability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, the emergence of often-radical forms of political Islam, and a surge in international terrorism emanating from the region. All these trends had deep roots in regional politics and society, all were simultaneously dramatized and invigorated by the Iranian revolution of 1979, and all posed severe difficulties for U.S. officials concerned with maintaining access and influence in a crucial area. Elsewhere, the United States could ride the wave of history; here, it was coming face to face with the intractable issues that would plague U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades.

In this more adverse climate, both the Carter and Reagan administrations struggled mightily to overcome the challenges they confronted. In some instances, as with the conflict against Middle Eastern terrorism, the problem simply proved resistant to the decisive application of U.S. power. In others, such as the struggle to stabilize the Gulf amid the Iran-Iraq War, progress on one front led to dilemmas and conflicts anew. Finally, in the case of Washington’s support for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, U.S. policies purchased short-term gains at the price of inflaming the underlying dangers. When the 1980s ended, then, lasting victories of the type won elsewhere in the world remained elusive, and Washington’s troubles in the Middle East were only escalating. As the unipolar era was gradually taking shape, then, so were some of the most persistent and perilous threats that would preoccupy U.S. officials in the years ahead.

These threats notwithstanding, by the late 1980s a mix of profound global trends and conscious U.S. policies had moved the world to the brink of an epochal shift in the international order. The consummation of that shift, which I examine in chapter 6, came between 1989 and 1992. During these years, the George H. W. Bush administration faced a series of epic strategic shocks that shattered the creaking Cold War structure and marked the transition to the post–Cold War era. And in each case, the administration responded in ways that established U.S. primacy as the foundation of the new global system. As the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled, Bush used U.S. influence to facilitate the reunification of Germany on terms that gutted the Warsaw Pact, and replaced a bifurcated European order with one in which Washington, its allies, and their values were clearly dominant. In responding to the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–1991, the administration showcased America’s unrivaled military and diplomatic muscle, and demonstrated that U.S. leadership would remain the essential guarantor of stability in the post-bipolar era. Finally, amid the decay and downfall of the Soviet Union, the Bush team laid the groundwork for a post–Cold War strategy aimed at preserving and exploiting U.S. primacy into the future. At a series of critical junctures in global politics, an administration that was often scored for lacking vision and purpose pursued policies that were both purposeful and visionary indeed.¹⁴

By the early 1990s, the United States had thus completed its impressive international revival, and the outlines of the unipolar order were coming plainly into view. American power had proven far more durable and resilient than so many observers had only fairly recently predicted; the crisis of U.S. primacy in the 1970s had been followed not by an inexorable decline into mediocrity but by the ascent to a new era of international preeminence. The key strategic questions that now confronted the United States were how long its unipolar moment would last, and how rewarding it would actually be.

Several interpretive themes run through this book; five are of primary importance. First, as noted previously, the post–Cold War unipolarity that the United States enjoyed was not defined solely by an abundance of material capabilities and the absence of a peer competitor—the metrics that international relations scholars generally use to characterize unipolar systems.¹⁵ Rather, American preeminence reflected a broader set of international arrangements and power dynamics. U.S. superiority in the military, economic, and strategic realms was reinforced by organic alliance and diplomatic relationships that enhanced America’s strength and extended its global influence. More important, that superiority was complemented by a soft-power ideological hegemony embodied in the breathtaking advance of free markets, free trade, and free political institutions. As discussed in the following chapters, Washington’s geopolitical triumph in the Cold War was intertwined with the increasing pervasiveness of its vision for how societies should be run and international interchange should be organized. The post– Cold War global imbalance in capabilities was thus equaled by the imbalance between the U.S.-supported liberal model and any of its rivals. The unipolar order was one in which the United States possessed multiple and mutually reinforcing dimensions of dominance, and it was this compound character that made America’s post–Cold War perch seem so formidable.

This first theme is closely related to a second, which has to do with the manner in which that order emerged in the first place. Contrary to what numerous authors have argued, the rise of the unipolar moment and America’s post–Cold War dominance was not a mere accident of history, or something that simply happened with the unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the Soviet collapse two years later.¹⁶ In reality, it was something that had much deeper, and broader, historical origins. This transformation traced back to a whole collection of deeply rooted international phenomena affecting issues ranging from superpower relations, to trends in the world’s political complexion, to the nature of the global economy. These were phenomena that began to unfold in earnest during the 1970s, that received an essential impetus from U.S. policy in the 1980s and after, and that thereby culminated in the astonishing historical rupture of the Bush era. In this sense, the global turn toward unipolarity was an episode that played out over a period of years, and it involved a broad range of issues, initiatives, and interventions that all interacted to produce the eventual outcome. The unipolar turn, in other words, was not a discrete event but rather a historical process, one that drew on long-term structural change as well as calculated U.S. strategy.

This second theme leads, in turn, to a third, which is that understanding the changes in the global environment during this period requires looking not solely to structure, on the one hand, or strategy, on the other, but to the symbiotic interaction between the two. Historians and other analysts have long argued the merits of individual agency versus structural forces interpretations of the past, a debate that has been vigorously renewed in recent scholarship on the end of the Cold War.¹⁷ What I argue in this book is that neither of these approaches is, by itself, adequate. The American resurgence would not have been possible without the tectonic shifts that commenced in the 1970s, which helped rejuvenate a sagging superpower and created tremendous opportunities for U.S. policymakers to exploit. Yet it is nearly inconceivable that events would have unfolded as they did had not U.S. policymakers so adroitly exploited those opportunities—by recognizing the trends in play and deploying American power to accentuate them, and by acting decisively at points of great fluidity in world affairs. The rise of the unipolar moment occurred at the nexus of impersonal historical forces and conscious policy choices; good strategy allowed the United States to make the most of its good fortune.

This statement holds true as a general proposition regarding the period under consideration in this book; it also pertains particularly to the two administrations that receive most extended treatment here. The Reagan and Bush administrations did not engender epochal global departures from scratch, and objective observers must recognize that both teams were exceptionally fortunate to wield power at a time when so much was breaking Washington’s way. But across a wide assortment of issues, both administrations proved highly adept at identifying the critical contingencies and conjunctures, and thereby leveraging U.S. influence to deliver outsized results. If a core task of strategy resides in determining the structural propensity of things and positioning one’s nation to profit, then American strategy in the Reagan and Bush years was historically potent and perceptive.¹⁸

This third theme, however, touches on a fourth, which is that the making of good strategy was itself a process, one that could be as iterative and messy as it was far-sighted and inspired. Strategy is too commonly thought of as a panacea that allows policymakers to transcend the challenges of the international environment, or as a roadmap that plots out all the twists and turns of policy in advance. But strategy is actually something quite different. Strategy is inherently iterative—it requires combining a long-range vision of where one wants to go with a degree of trial-and-error adaptation in devising the concrete policies that will get one there. Strategy is also inherently messy—it is an imperfect discipline in which missteps and trade-offs are unavoidable.¹⁹ American strategy during this period underscores these innate characteristics. It generally took time for U.S. policymakers to fully grasp the global trends that emerged during the 1970s, and to integrate those trends into long-range visions for national renewal. It often took even more time and effort, along with a substantial amount of learning and recalibration, to turn those visions into the effective policies that so improved the U.S. posture during the 1980s. Whether in U.S.-Soviet relations, democracy promotion, or efforts to spread market-oriented reforms, the road to success was bumpy and tortuous. In each case, American strategy would eventually get the country to the desired destination—but not without detours and course corrections along the way.

Even then, the legacy of U.S. strategy and resurgence was not without ambiguities; this is a fifth and final theme. On the whole, America’s international position improved greatly over the years covered in this book, and the record of U.S. policy could reasonably be called one of historic achievement. By the early 1990s, the United States had attained a level of international superiority and reach that empires past could only have dreamed of. From the early 1990s onward, Washington would then manage to sustain its unipolar status for longer than many international-relations experts had initially predicted, while also using its prerogatives to continue influencing global outcomes in unparalleled—and often very constructive—ways. By virtually any reasonable standard—and certainly compared to what so many informed observers had expected in the late 1970s—these outcomes were enviable indeed.

Yet we must avoid the triumphalism that can be so tempting in recounting this history, because there was a debit side of the ledger as well.²⁰ The global forces unleashed in the 1970s were not uniformly beneficial for America, for they included challenges—such as Islamic radicalism and Middle Eastern terrorism—that would bedevil U.S. policymakers for decades. Nor were even the positive changes unalloyed in their effects. As we will see, the strategic successes of the 1980s frequently came at a cost, whether in moral, financial, or even geopolitical terms, and in some cases they helped foster the very problems that U.S. strategy would confront in the unipolar era. Similarly, phenomena such as globalization and neoliberalism would ultimately prove to be something of a double-edged sword. Not least of all, the U.S. determination to maintain the primacy it had won by the early 1990s had its own downsides. It would leave the country engaged in a costly and taxing global mission, while also courting the hubris that came with unrivaled strength—and the enmity of those whom U.S. power and policies seemed to threaten. For all the benefits it bestowed, the unipolar moment would therefore not be a time of peace or repose for America. It would simply introduce the country to a new set of dangers and problems.

CHAPTER 1

Roots of Resurgence

Unipolarity is a rare and valuable commodity in international affairs. It refers not simply to a situation in which a leading country has marginally more power than its competitors, but to one in which the leader has a clear and overwhelming superiority. A country that enjoys unipolarity has no near-term challengers for the status of preeminent actor in the international system; it can also do far more than any other country to shape that system to its own benefit. For a country to have unipolarity, then, is to have more than great influence over its own destiny. It is to have an unmatched say in how the broader world works.¹

The deepest origins of America’s post–Cold War unipolarity lie not in the close of the superpower conflict in 1989, or in the end of World War II a half-century earlier. They lie in the very opening of U.S. history, generations before. From its birth as a republic, the United States possessed attributes that would enable a meteoric geopolitical rise. It boasted uniquely favorable geography that offered cheap security and abundant chances for territorial enlargement, and a natural resource base that provided the foundations of awesome economic power. It was equally blessed with an energetic and fecund population, a national ideology that both impelled and rationalized American assertiveness, and a political system that generally performed well enough to let the country make the most of its other advantages. From the late 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, these characteristics permitted not just a steady accretion of U.S. power and influence; they underwrote a record of expansion and national aggrandizement that had few historical peers.

This was the long-term backdrop to what might be thought of as America’s first unipolar moment—the period after World War II. By the time the guns fell silent in 1945, the United States was preeminent in virtually all key measures of national might. In economic terms, U.S. output roughly equaled that of the rest of the world combined. In military terms, America accounted for three-quarters of great-power defense spending, and it alone possessed the atomic bomb, an air force with global striking power, and a navy that dominated the maritime commons. In diplomatic and ideological terms, no country emerged from the war with greater influence or prestige. As Melvyn Leffler has written, the United States possessed a preponderance of power.² In the postwar decades, that power enabled a sustained global activism meant to craft world affairs. America’s Cold War statecraft, said Henry Kissinger, was premised on the notion of a predominant United States, as the only stable country, the richest country, the country without whose leadership and physical contribution nothing was possible, and which had to make all the difference for defense and progress everywhere in the world.³

The results of this approach were impressive by any standard, and as Daniel Sargent has written, U.S. policies erected a veritable Pax Americana.⁴ The relatively liberal international economy that emerged in the noncommunist world after World War II was certainly an American project. U.S. money and technology helped rebuild shattered societies in Western Europe and East Asia, and revive them as thriving hubs of capitalist prosperity. The Bretton Woods institutions promoted reconstruction, development, and economic stability within a generally pro-market framework. Washington likewise gave impetus to postwar trade liberalization through its role in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and by opening its own market to foreign goods, while the dollar sat at the center of world commerce and finance. In sum, the United States spearheaded the creation of a vibrant Western economy from the wreckage left by global war, and served as the leader of the international trade and monetary order. This postwar economic system, Jonathan Kirshner writes, was successful beyond its most optimistic hopes, ushering in a quarter-century known as the golden age of capitalism, of unprecedented global economic growth and prosperity.⁵

The U.S.-led economic order was intertwined with a geopolitical and security order that was equally Washington-centric. Had the Cold War not erupted, America’s postwar geopolitical presence would not have been so extensive; the fact that the Cold War did erupt ensured that this presence soon became nearly global. The United States headed a network of military alliances that provided security and locked in American influence in key regions of the world. The country also maintained unprecedented peacetime military forces meant to provide leverage vis-à-vis Moscow and to substantiate these global commitments. Not least, U.S. officials used their country’s wealth and influence to affect the fate of developing nations from Latin America to Southeast Asia and beyond, in hopes of keeping them beyond the Kremlin’s reach and integrating them into the Western economic and political orbit. From the Marshall Plan to the Alliance for Progress, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the nuclear arms race, the outlines of the postwar world bore the imprint of American primacy.

The problem with being on top, however, is that one can only go down from there. America’s postwar dominance was based not only on its own strengths, but on the weaknesses of a world laid prone by wartime devastation. So even as Washington put its power to such productive use after World War II, that power was in relative decline. The economic recovery of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, the gradual rise of the Kremlin as a full-fledged military and diplomatic rival, and the emergence of a growing and more assertive Third World: these trends meant that, while America’s absolute wealth and capabilities grew following the war, its comparative standing was steadily receding from the imposing heights of 1945. By the late 1960s, Richard Nixon would write that the postwar period in international relations has ended. America’s superiority had become less overwhelming; its advantages were not what they had been.⁶

This theme of decline was particularly pervasive during the 1970s—the decade I analyze in this chapter, and one that constituted a critical inflection point in the trajectory of U.S. power. At the time, the 1970s often appeared to mark the last, dying breath of U.S. primacy. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the oil shocks, American leaders confronted crises that laid bare the limits of U.S. influence and showed a superpower in retreat. More broadly, the decade produced a seeming abundance of evidence to suggest that the underlying strategic currents were unfavorable, and that Washington was inexorably losing its capacity to shape global affairs. No longer did the United States appear to be the colossus of the early postwar years; no longer did its arc seem to point upward. As one Ford-era official said, it was clear that we were in a new world in which U.S. supremacy was fading fast.⁷

This was the impression many informed observers took away from the 1970s, and one that was often echoed in leading scholarly assessments that emerged in that decade and even after.⁸ With the distance of time, however, we can now see that the history of the 1970s was neither so straightforward nor discouraging as it initially looked. To be sure, the United States was battered by crises during this period, and policymakers often seemed at a loss to deal with those challenges. But even amid such travails, the global system was undergoing profound tectonic changes that would prove immensely beneficial to the United States. The onset of the terminal decline of the Soviet empire, the emergence of a transnational human rights movement and third-wave democratization, and the rise of globalization and other economic transformations—these trends were laying the groundwork for reinvigorated statecraft and a renewed geopolitical ascent. Appearances to the contrary, the 1970s did not represent the twilight of the American age. They were the prologue to America’s post–Cold War unipolar moment.

The 1970s and the Crisis of American Power

Perceptions of U.S. decline were ubiquitous during the 1970s. At home and abroad, the conventional wisdom was that America had passed its apex of global power. Intelligence and diplomatic reports regularly brought news of allies’ decreasing confidence in U.S. authority; adversaries gloated about Washington’s weakness. The United States is presently seen as suffering setbacks and defeats—giving ground on several fronts, noted one National Security Council (NSC) appraisal in 1975.⁹ The shah of Iran privately predicted that the United States might become a fifth or even a tenth-rate power, and Marxist guerrilla groups asserted that the imperialist tiger has begun to show signs of weakness and fatigue.¹⁰ Even top U.S. officials worried about the country’s prospects. Henry Kissinger lamented that never has America been weaker, and Richard Nixon mused that the nation might be treading a well-worn path of decadence and downfall. I think of what happened to Greece and to Rome, he said; what is left—only the pillars.¹¹ This analogy was quite common; observers inside and outside government saw the United States as an empire in decay.¹²

It is not hard to understand why so many were so bearish about America’s future, for the 1970s were a decade when Washington’s international position often looked to be crumbling. Setbacks and crises were legion, indicators of lost preeminence were all too easy to find. America had hit its years of middle age and decline, one observer wrote even as the decade began: wherever one looked, there were signs of how far U.S. influence had fallen.¹³

Nowhere did that decline seem starker than in the economic realm. Throughout the postwar era, U.S. power had rested on a foundation of economic hegemony. In 1945, America possessed half of the world’s manufacturing capacity and an economy perhaps five times larger than its nearest competitor. It produced half of the world’s steel and oil, controlled the bulk of international financial reserves, and dominated the competition for export markets. We are the giant of the economic world, Harry Truman declared in 1947. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends on us.¹⁴ In the years that followed, this economic might underwrote the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, enabled the provision of foreign aid to countries around the world, and financed the military power that undergirded a global containment policy. In myriad ways, economic primacy was the bedrock of U.S. influence.

By the early 1970s, however, that primacy had eroded significantly. As Japan, West Germany, and other countries rebounded from the devastation of World War II—using U.S. aid and support to do so—the balance of economic power swung dramatically. Whereas Washington had bestrode the world economy in 1945 and commanded 27.3 percent of global GDP in 1950, by 1970 its share had fallen to 22.4 percent.¹⁵ America’s share of oil and steel production, international reserves, and world exports declined sharply, as did its trade and payments balances. Meanwhile, Japan’s GDP rose by around 11 percent annually during the 1960s, its portion of world GDP roughly quadrupled between 1950 and 1970, and its manufactures increasingly competed with U.S. products for market share. The European Economic Community also grew rapidly, coming to rival the U.S. economy in size, and West Germany became an economic juggernaut in its own right.¹⁶ While the U.S. continues to be the world’s most advanced economy, wrote White House adviser Peter Peterson in 1971, the gap between ourselves and the rest of the developed world has been narrowing. Treasury Secretary John Connally was blunter: No longer does the U.S. economy dominate the free world.¹⁷

The collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971 was a symptom of this relative decline. In simplified form, Bretton Woods was a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates in which countries tied the value of their currencies to the dollar, while the dollar was tied to gold. Since its advent at the close of World War II, this system had been a mechanism for preserving monetary stability within a pro-growth and pro-trade framework. It was no less a symbol of American leadership and power. Bretton Woods represented the U.S. commitment to managing a prosperous and comparatively open world order after the chaos of depression and war. More tangibly, it enshrined the dollar as the preeminent national currency, the primary medium of global exchange, and the anchor of international trade and finance.

This status gave the United States prestige and important benefits, namely the ability to run deficits that would otherwise have been unsustainable. Yet it also carried significant costs. Bretton Woods required the United States to stabilize international monetary relations by pegging its currency to gold at $35/ounce, while also lubricating the system by providing a steady outflow of dollars to foreign countries—all while sending still more dollars abroad via overseas troop deployments and foreign aid. This was the famous Triffin dilemma—that Bretton Woods essentially forced Washington to run a payments deficit to facilitate world growth and liquidity, but that in doing so it ensured that the real value of the dollar would eventually fall out of alignment with its nominal value. In other words, Bretton Woods imposed heavy and conflicting burdens on its leader, burdens that accumulated over time. It was a system that could be maintained only by a truly hegemonic power, and the impressive postwar performance of the Western economy was tribute to America’s ability to play this role.¹⁸

As U.S. economic hegemony diminished after 1945, however, the costs of Bretton Woods gradually became too much to bear. By the late 1960s, the outflow of dollars had made the U.S. payments imbalance look dangerously unsustainable, and the system was plagued by chronic instability. Monetary crises were becoming more frequent and severe; Bretton Woods was being held together only through emergency interventions and the use of capital controls in the United States and other countries. Most troubling of all, the threat of a run on the dollar—in which foreign banks cashed in their devalued greenbacks against the limited U.S. supply of gold—hovered ominously. Richard Nixon’s decision to suspend dollar-gold convertibility in August 1971, thereby abandoning the core of the Bretton Woods system, thus represented nothing so much as an admission of American financial overstretch. As IMF officials noted, The changes in relative economic position among the major countries during the past 25 years have meant that the United States is no longer in a position . . . to assume ultimate and virtually sole responsibility for the functioning of the system.¹⁹

Although the abandonment of Bretton Woods would ultimately benefit the United States, the short-term aftermath merely compounded doubts about its leadership and power. The Western world was in disarray, as Washington and its allies grappled inconclusively—and contentiously—over what should replace the now-defunct system. European leaders want to ‘screw’ us and we want to ‘screw’ them in the economic area, Nixon said.²⁰ The leading Western powers eventually and rather fitfully settled on a more flexible system of floating exchange rates, but the cost of this shift, writes Harold James, was a fair measure of anarchy.²¹ The demise of Bretton Woods and its fixed parities threw the world into a period of monetary disorder, fueling inflation and exposing currencies to sharp, destabilizing swings. The dollar was particularly vulnerable, losing 43 percent of its value against the deutschmark and 36 percent against the yen from late 1972 to late 1978. The dollar is regarded all over the world as a sick currency, wrote one observer.²² With the dollar in decline and the West careening from one monetary crisis to another, it was natural to wonder if the end of the U.S. era had arrived.

This was certainly the impression given by the oil shocks. The postwar Western economic boom had been fueled by cheap and plentiful oil, and America had held great sway in the global energy equation as the world’s largest producer. By the early 1970s, however, these permissive conditions were gone. The United States was no longer the world’s swing producer—its share of global production had fallen, and it lacked spare capacity to tap in times of crisis. Meanwhile, skyrocketing overall demand during the 1950s and 1960s had tightened the world market, leaving the West more vulnerable to fluctuations in price or supply, and giving the major exporters—many of which had banded together in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)—greater leverage. At the instigation of key Middle Eastern producers such as Libya and Iran, prices rose by 45 percent from early 1970 to mid-1973, and close observers warned that a full-blown crisis was nigh. This time, the top State Department energy expert wrote, the wolf is here.²³

The reckoning came in late 1973. The October War led the Arab producers to impose temporary—but punishing—cutbacks on production and an embargo on shipments to the United States that lasted into the next year. More important from a long-term perspective, OPEC approved price hikes leading to a quadrupling of the cost of oil (from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel) between mid-1973 and early 1974.²⁴ The resulting crisis was a geoeconomic event of the first order. It caused a massive resource transfer from consumers to producers, giving OPEC leaders such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran unprecedented wealth and influence. It underscored the reliance of the West on resources possessed by others, and the fact that the First World was therefore captive to the whims of a few desert states in the Third. Efforts to redress this weakness by forging greater consumer unity produced only middling results, and U.S. officials were soon reduced to imploring Persian Gulf autocrats not to raise prices further, lest disaster result.²⁵ In short, the oil crisis upended global power dynamics and inverted assumptions about influence and dependency. We are now living in a never-never land, Kissinger said, in which tiny, poor and weak nations can hold up for ransom some of the industrialized world.²⁶

Indeed, the traumatic effects of the oil shock were profound and far-reaching, and they shook the very pillars of the Western order. Inflation surpassed 20 percent in some industrial countries, while growth plunged and unemployment skyrocketed. Oil importers scrambled to cover rising energy bills, and several NATO allies seemed close to financial catastrophe. One suddenly plausible nightmare scenario was a cascade of defaults that might throw the world economy into chaos; another was that economic turmoil might drag countries such as France, Spain, and Italy hard to the left. European leaders such as Helmut Schmidt invoked the specter of the 1930s in warning of depression and unrest. U.S. officials feared for the future of the global economy, and the stability of the noncommunist world. I’m convinced that the biggest problem we face now is possible economic collapse, Kissinger said: fall of the western world.²⁷

Although these worst-case contingencies never came to pass, the oil crisis still cast grave doubts on U.S. staying power. Coming as postwar growth rates had already begun to decline, soaring energy prices ruthlessly exposed inefficiency and weakness. U.S. gross national product (GNP) fell 6 percent between 1973 and 1975, unemployment doubled to nearly 9 percent, and inflation hit 13.5 percent by decade’s end. Entire sectors of manufacturing were hollowed out, with the auto industry shedding over one-third of its workforce in three years. Real wages slumped, and poverty began to rise.²⁸ Most troubling of all, policymakers had no solutions for these problems. I had a depressing breakfast with economic advisors, who don’t know what to do about inflation or energy, Carter wrote in 1979.²⁹ By this point, the Iranian revolution had set off a second oil shock, further battering the economy and accentuating the crisis of the American spirit that Carter identified in his July 1979 address.³⁰ Relief would come only when overproduction and new supplies drove down prices in the early 1980s. All told, it was an intensely demoralizing state of affairs, one that raised fundamental questions about America’s future as a global power. As one official with the State Department Policy Planning Staff warned in 1980, the U.S. is not in a strong economic position to pursue an activist foreign policy in the years to come.³¹

Nor did the broader U.S. geopolitical position seem particularly robust during the 1970s. The twenty-five years prior to that decade had seen a dramatic expansion of U.S. presence and influence overseas. From the construction of an alliance system that nearly spanned the globe, to Washington’s economic statecraft and its interventions in the Third World, America had energetically used its power to mold the development of other societies and construct a sphere of influence as vast as that of any empire past. By the 1960s, there was hardly an area of the noncommunist world in which the country was not involved in critical issues of politics, security, and economics. In many ways, the escalating U.S. intervention in South Vietnam in the latter half of that decade represented the apogee of this remarkable geopolitical project. The fact that Lyndon Johnson could devote 500,000 troops, and copious treasure, to a war in a small country far from the world’s central strategic theaters was a marker of just how powerful and ambitious postwar America really was. By the 1970s, however, ambition and power alike were coming under doubt. A world that was increasingly assertive in its own right no longer seemed so receptive to U.S. guidance, and along the global perimeter, Washington often appeared to be in ignominious retreat.

The shifting of the tide was signaled, appropriately, by events in Southeast Asia. As early as 1968, the long U.S. campaign to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam had been stalemated by revolutionary nationalism. The 1970s saw the final failure of that campaign, with the evacuation from Saigon in 1975 a humiliating coda to the whole sad saga. Kissinger had earlier vowed that America would not be confounded by a fifth rate agricultural power, but in the end, this was just what happened.³² Along the way, the war caused major cleavages in U.S. politics and society; it also exposed the limits of both America’s military power and its ability to sustain accumulated global commitments indefinitely. No longer would the country pay any price, bear any burden to assure the survival and the success of liberty. The new reality, as Nixon wrote, was that America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.³³ Not surprisingly, the war bred doubt and alarm among those who depended on U.S. power, while invigorating those who sought radical change. Our allies have been disturbed, and our adversaries heightened, said CIA Director William Colby.³⁴

Other setbacks soon followed. During the late 1970s, Washington was forced to surrender ownership of the Panama Canal—a key symbol of America’s rise to global power—after being outmaneuvered by a crafty dictator who mobilized anti-U.S. and anticolonial sentiment to generate irresistible diplomatic pressure. The world we live in today is not the world of Teddy Roosevelt, one U.S. official lamented.³⁵ Then, in 1979, the Carter administration watched helplessly as the pro-U.S. regime in Nicaragua was overthrown by Marxist rebels, presaging a decade of war—and increased Soviet and Cuban influence—in Central America. That same year, Carter saw another longtime ally, the shah of Iran, toppled by a revolt that shattered the U.S. position in the Persian Gulf and empowered virulently anti-American Islamist revolutionaries. The subsequent hostage crisis underscored how willing those revolutionaries were to challenge Washington, while Carter’s inability to respond effectively exacerbated perceptions of U.S. debility. As Carter acknowledged, he felt the same kind of impotence that a powerful person feels when his child is kidnapped.³⁶ In place after place, the superpower was on the defensive, losing long-held positions and its ability to influence events.

U.S. authority was certainly under attack throughout much of the Third World. Since World War II, American leaders had sought to direct the political and economic development of the global south, even trying to reshape entire regions in the U.S. image. By the 1970s, however, these hopes had come in for a hard landing. The failures of programs such as the Alliance for Progress had dispelled what Nixon called the illusion that we alone could remake continents.³⁷ More worrying still, the Third World often appeared quite hostile to U.S. policy. From Latin America to the Middle East, Washington confronted a rising tide of nationalism, anti-U.S. sentiment, and ideological radicalism. The growing body of developing nations often took neutralist or pro-Soviet positions in the United Nations, and organizations such as the Group of 77 (G-77) and Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) used anti-Americanism as a least-common denominator among their diverse memberships. It was a world where more and more don’t like us, said Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in 1975. For the last decade and for the next generation, the U.S. will be a beleaguered garrison in international forums.³⁸

Nothing made this clearer than the Third World economic challenge. It was not just OPEC that sought to reshape global economic relations; by the early 1970s, much of the Third World was rebelling against the liberal postwar order. Empowered by the apparent weakness and disarray of the industrial West, and conscious of