America Between the Wars

"The two wars it defines are the Cold War and the War on Terror. Neither of them are traditional hot wars. So it’s 1989 to 2001. Exactly. The authors make a good case that this is a distinct period, at least in America – a feel-good period, which has been called the long nineties. There’s a nice quote in the book, from Newt Gingrich of all people, who says it was like a Great Gatsby period, where nothing was too serious and everyone was making money. Whale, in his case, is quite appropriate. I’m sure he was. He was a big figure then, with the revolt against Clinton, and was at his political height. Complacency is a little harsh, although perhaps fair in hindsight. I would call it optimism. At least they had a vision – and quite an attractive one, based around the power of American capitalist and democratic ideas. It was an optimistic period for America, because they won the Cold War. By the end of the eighties America was also extremely worried about the rise of Japan. But then the Berlin wall fell, the Japanese bubble deflated, and the tech revolution began in America. For the Americans, who thought of themselves as a rustbelt economy with Wall Street attached, the tech revolution was both a great new engine of wealth, and a symbol of technological transformation. But it was also read – probably correctly – as a proof of American capitalism’s enduring inventiveness and ability to regenerate the United States. That is a message that in the aftermath of their triumph in the Cold War had enormous political resonance. This is why we won the Cold War, was the thought in the back of people’s minds – we can create a Silicon Valley because of the political values and individualism that allow it to flourish. 9/11 obviously. It gave the feeling that the holiday from history is over, and that America is back in serious and dangerous times. So it was the end of the era in one way, but I think that 2008 and [the collapse of] Lehmann Brothers will actually be more significant. 9/11 created a sense of American vulnerability but it didn’t create any sense of the limits to American power. On the contrary, you got a resurgence of the attitude of going out to remake the world, which is what the neocons are all about. For the neocons the War on Terror was a way of reasserting American power, and remaking the world in America’s image. The idea was to go out there, where there were a few outliers who hadn’t seen the light and converted to American democracy and capitalism, and invade them. If you look at the Bob Kagan , or at the theorists of what America was doing when it invaded Iraq, there was a vision derived from the Second World War and the remaking of Japan – that what they were doing was a form of benificent imperialism. No. Actually I don’t think an alternative world view has sprung up yet. But a faith in globalisation, convergence, and the belief in American power both in its reality and in its beneficial qualities, seems much less self-evident now than it did back then. And the faith in financial capitalism really has gone. But if you want a sense of how people were thinking in the heyday of America as sole superpower, with globalisation going very well, America Between the Wars is as good an account as there is of the thinking inside the Clinton White House. The authors have extremely good access to all of the key people in that era, and interviewed them all subsequently. So it has the advantage of recent history that all the actors are still around and the authors understand their mentality. And they create a very readable narrative out of it, of how Clinton and the people around him saw the world. It already feels a bit like a period piece, actually."