There were two major, earth-shaking events in the history of US relations with the world as a whole between 1990 and 2013. The first was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The second was 9/11. What was the basic, bottom-line impact of these events on US relations with the world? That was our question for our last class meeting.
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, this meant that not only was the Cold War unquestionably over, but it could not really resume, even with profound reversals of political trends in (the now sovereign) Republic of Russia. Yes, they still had plenty of nukes. But their economy was in the midst of collapse and barely-legalized looting by insider politicians and businessmen, and the Russians had lost a great deal of the landmass that had helped make them a superpower. Even in 2013, with some semblance of economic stability and political potency restored under Putin, Russia can counter certain diplomatic moves by the US, but no one thinks it can hope to become a rival to the US. American pundits starting in 1990 celebrated the new "unipolar world," one with only a single superpower (or hyperpower, as some said), the United States of America. This was a dramatically different state of affairs than the one Richard Nixon had said was emerging in the early 1970s. Back then, Nixon described a multipolar power structure in the world, one with five major players: the US, the USSR, the PRC, a partly unified Western Europe, and Japan. I suppose some would say that in terms of economic power he was right. But in terms of sheer force, the US stood alone as the 1990s began and it still does.
One thing this meant was that starting in the 1990s, the United States military filled the strategic vacuum that the Soviet collapse created, by stationing troops (on formal US bases or through other arrangements) in many countries that had emerged from the old Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia. This meant, eventually, that a map of US bases in the Middle East and Central Asia looks like this:
This is from 2011 (the map appeared on Juan Cole's excellent website, Informed Comment). But many of these gains occurred in the '90s, as a glance at the maps in The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson reveals. The whole in the doughnut is Iran, of course. They're so aggressive!
Throughout the Cold War, both superpowers had always had to think about how the other might respond before using force internationally. Of course, this consideration often failed to inhibit superpower warfare, especially in proxy wars (you could list these almost endlessly). But there were some limits. Historians agree that US presidents, specifically Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, did place limits on their actions during the US-Vietnam War, mainly out of well-founded fears that the Chinese (not even worried so much about the Soviets on this score) would enter the war directly if the US crossed certain lines. (And no, this does not mean the US fought with one hand tied behind its back. Please. Think about whether, say, a US ground invasion of "North Vietnam" would have made US victory more likely. In this case the PRC saved the US from a worse disaster than the war already was.)
No more. Whatever exact increases in US power resulted from the Cold War's end - and it's an interesting exercise to try to think about precisely how you measure this, or other things like an increase in national security - America clearly was now less inhibited in the use of force.
As President George Bush the Elder quickly demonstrated.
That's Bush 41 in the front seat, with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf behind him. The new faces of American power. This is late 1990 in Saudi Arabia. They are inspecting the situation. Bush had ordered hundreds of thousands of American troops to mass here, a remarkable action in itself in light of historic Saudi reluctance to station foreign, specifically infidel troops in Islam's holiest land. But the idea, at least officially, was to protect Saudi territory from a further aggressive action by the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein, which invaded and occupied the whole of Kuwait in August. This operation, called Desert Shield, led to Desert Storm, the official name for the US war against Iraq, fought strictly for the purpose of repulsing Iraq from Kuwait and restoring the status quo ante bellum. There was plenty of gnashing of teeth about this, in 1991 and later - Bush should have gone to Baghdad and "finished the job" - but this was clearly a war fought for Middle Eastern stability, and virtually everyone in Bush's government in 1991 agreed. Yes, this means Dick Cheney, Bush 41's secretary of defense.
(Actually Bush had already demonstrated what the US could do in 1989 with his invasion of Panama, a direct US invasion that, even in Central America, might have been unthinkable in light of the Cold War just a few years before then.)
Moving on to Huge Event #2.
I do remember where I was that morning. I was at home watching television. Which is a strange thing, since normally I do not have the TV on in the morning. Have no idea why I had it on then, but I did. When I turned it on, the first plane had already crashed into the first tower. A few minutes later I saw the second plane fly into the second tower. It took about five seconds and then I thought, "Oh." This isn't an accident. I am sure lots of people thought the same thing at about the same moment.
Below is a collage of photos of most of the people killed on 9/11.
It became a popular refrain after 9/11 that the United States, in the 1990s, had taken a "sabbatical" or "vacation" from "history." At least in certain circles. This idea had legs because many Americans, probably most Americans, had had no idea that there was deep concern within the US national-security leadership during President Bill Clinton's administration about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. If you still doubt this, have a look at Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke. Quite absorbing. Actually, as I explained to my students, the United States first declared a "war on terror" in the 1980s, when Moammar Qaddafi was the Saddam Hussein (or the Osama bin Laden, take your pick) of the Reagan years. Reagan ordered major air strikes against Qaddafi in 1986, after an initial skirmish in 1981. Terrorism was a big, big deal back in the '80s. Remember Pan Am 103? I sure hope you do. That appears to have been Qaddafi's payback for 1986, which was supposed to be payback for the bombing of a disco in West Berlin. Starting to get the picture?
It wasn't Bill Clinton who first got tired of this sort of lethal back-and-forth, which seemed to have no real endgame. Reagan himself basically stopped talking about terrorism (especially after it was revealed he had secretly sold weapons to Iran, which he accused of sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East - oops!). Then Bush 41 shifted the focus to wars against states deemed bad and threatening actors. Behind the scenes, Clinton gradually got more and more worried about al-Qaeda with a series of increasingly spectacular attacks on US personnel. Then Bush 43 took over, and clearly he and his team were disdainful of the outgoing Clinton administration's focus on non-state terrorism. This was revealed fully in the investigations of the 9/11 Commission, which - it should be noted - Bush 43 really did not want. He truly resisted creating the commission, but eventually decided he had to give in an acceded to its establishment. Also he insisted that he would only give testimony himself in closed session (not surprising for any president) and with his vice president, Dick Cheney, sitting next to him (which was weird).
Among the things I learned from reading the 9/11 Commission Report:
The very afternoon of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defense, wrote a note that read, in part:
"Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL . Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
S.H. is Saddam Hussein, UBL is Osama bin Laden.
It's not news that, even before 9/11, high Bush 43 officials were talking routinely about "what do to about Iraq." Iraq was a problem - wasn't it? Got to do something....
9/11 was immediately seen as an opportunity to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam. Afghanistan - which harbored bin Laden and had a close working relationship with al-Qaeda, even if the Taliban government had not actually known about the 9/11 attacks when bin Laden planned them - would have to come first. (And last, as it turns out.) This was unavoidable, it seemed. Not that there weren't arguments made against a conventional war aimed at ousting the Taliban from Kabul. There were, ranging from CIA arguments that special forces could do the job to arguments, mainly from Democrats, that a sharp focus on al-Qaeda was smarter than shifting the focus, once again, to state structures. But politically, the invasion of Afghanistan was the real "slam dunk" (apologies to George Tenet - or not). But after Afghanistan, Part Deux would be Iraq. This became clear pretty fast in Washington. The PR machine got cranked up in the later part of 2002 - the Mohamed Atta meeting with Iraqi officials in Prague, etc. All rather cynical, to be sure.
But none of this is to say, necessarily, that high Bush 43 officials never meant any of what they said about the links between 9/11 and Iraq. In a way, they were quite plain. Iraq had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and suggestions that there were such links were, as I say, cynical efforts to mislead the public. But US officials from 2001 to 2003 also made a different argument. The neoconservative argument was that terrorism emanated from the Middle East in general and that the US had to "drain the swamp," initiating sweeping change in the region, to make it safe for America and the world. No longer could the US pursue its conservative, traditional policy of keeping authoritarian regimes in place. Bad things were festering inside those boxes, things that were escaping and doing damage to the outside world. By establishing a US protectorate in Iraq, a potentially wealthy and powerful country, a major country, in the heart of the Middle East and the Arab world, a democratic transformation (or at least a pro-American one, not necessarily the same thing) could begin in the region. This is what Rumsfeld meant by "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." He wasn't assuming Iraq had had anything to do with 9/11. Of course if it had, this would have been convenient. But he was linking Iraq and al-Qaeda even if such ties didn't exist (the "it" of "Sweep it all up").
A lot more dead in Bush's Iraq War than on 9/11. A lot more. Here are some of their faces in another collage.
So, what did the end of the Cold War and the results of 9/11 change? How much did the US relationship with the world change? Let's put the question different. Is the US a more powerful country today than it was in 1990? A less powerful country? About the same? In the first months of the Iraq War in 2003, we started to hear a lot about the American "empire," either as a reality or a desideratum. Funny. Time was you could start a pretty good argument by saying there was an American empire. Now it became a commonplace, the term often used approvingly. That fad kind of faded as the Iraq invasion turned sour. Under President Barack Obama, there has been some retraction from the boldest, biggest visions of US global hegemony. But certainly not as much of a turn toward US modesty as some of Obama's liberal supporters in 2008 hoped (for the record, I think Obama has largely conducted US foreign policy as he said he would back then).
My students achieved no consensus on this question of the current state of US power. Some were very impressed with US power today, others saw the limits of US power standing out more clearly. We have learned over and over again that preponderant military power does not equal an unlimited capacity to impose one's will on the world. Interestingly, among my students who still see the US as very, very powerful, some remained impressed the America's "soft power," i.e., its political, diplomatic, and cultural influence. Some Americans worried during the Bush 43 years that the US was throwing that all away. Maybe it was recoverable after all. It takes a lot to really destroy a computer's hard drive. And US power is, perhaps, something close to hard-wired in global structures by now. Lousy metaphor I guess, and maybe Norwegians are not representative. But global power arrangements don't change so quickly.
It's been a great semester teaching here. Even on a sabbatical! I am really thankful to all my students here in Oslo for sticking with me this semester. At least as long as Norway has stuck with America!