The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 85 How We Got Here America Between the Wars — From 11/9 to 9/11 — The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, Public Affairs, 2008, $27.95, hard- cover, 432 pages. R EVIEWED BY J AMES D E H ART The next president of the United States will inherit a number of specif- ic foreign policy challenges, ranging from Afghanistan and Iraq to North Korea. If history is any guide, he’ll feel compelled to deal with them not in isolation, but in the context of a reinvented foreign policy doctrine. Perhaps by this time next year, we’ll have a new theme that consigns “free- dom agenda” and “war on terror” to the bumper-sticker dustbin, alongside “new world order” and “assertive mul- tilateralism.” In their excellent America Be- tween the Wars — From 11/9 to 9/11 — The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror , authors Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier recount the efforts of three U.S. administrations to articulate (and sim- plify) a vision for America’s role in the post–Cold War world. The period of history they examine is one that defies easy labels. Consider the term “post– Cold War world,” which merely ex- plained what the era wasn’t, rather than what it was. The authors argue that the 1990s were hardly what President George W. Bush called “years of repose, years of sabbatical.” On the contrary, it was a decade of crucial debate between— and especially within — the Demo- cratic and Republican foreign policy establishments that shaped their respective responses to 9/11 and con- tinue unabated today. What looked to columnist George Will like a “holiday from history,” the authors see as an era of continuity and consequences. Central to the foreign policy debates of the 1990s was the issue of military force: When should it be used, and how important is it to work through the United Nations? After assembling a “coalition of the willing” to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush be- lieved he had found a template for the future, with principles of internation- al conduct enforced by a reinvigorat- ed Security Council. Yet within a few years, the United States and its NATO allies would bypass the U.N. to evict Serb forces from Kosovo — a precur- sor, perhaps, to how the current administration would handle the world. Chollet and Goldgeier, both veter- ans of the Clinton administration, bring balance and objectivity to their analysis. (Chollet is an adjunct pro- fessor at Georgetown University, while Goldgeier teaches at The George Washington University.) They pull no punches in recounting Clinton’s early missteps on gays in the military, Somalia and Haiti, which led to the perception that there was a “weak hand on the wheel.” And they are more than fair to Newt Gingrich, complimenting his “global and strate- gic vision” even as he led a band of congressional freshmen whose proud- est boast was that they had never before owned a passport. According to the authors, it was the Republican majority’s drift toward isolation, coupled with the early inept- itude of the Clinton administration, which led to the rise of the neocon- servatives. While they shared with the “liberal hawks” a concept of America as the “indispensable na- tion,” the neocons saw globalization as “globaloney” and persisted in seeing future threats in terms of one nation invading another, ignoring the signifi- cance of non-state actors, like al- Qaida. B OOKS Chollet and Goldgeier persuasively argue that the 1990s were hardly a “holiday from history.”