What a wonderful world it seemed in the 1990s. TheUnited States had not only won the Cold War; it had demonstrated the economic,political, and moral superiority of its own system, the free market. Those abroadwho had long resented U.S. global policies were finally revealed to beself-defeating nationalists or superannuated Marxists. Even the Latin Americanswere scrambling to catch the laissez-faire wave, firing their planners, hiringChicago-trained economists, slashing antiquated welfare outlays, privatizingstate enterprises, and, above all, opening themselves to foreign private capital.
The world's truly destitute were easily written off as hopeless cases;they were simply mired in their own corruption and lassitude. In every society,the most nimble and alert were precisely those who most wanted to be likeAmericans. Indeed, weren't two million of them sneaking across our borders everyyear as millions more were turned away? America was now the sole superpower inevery sense. History had ended; and its end was liberal capitalism.
Geopolitically, the Soviet Union hadn't just collapsed, it had splintered--onemore sign that the nation-state was dead, overtaken by the universal market.Threats to national security had been reduced to small mopping-up operations.Clinton was somewhat energetic in trying to fix festering regional problems likeIreland, Serbia, and Palestine; Bush, less so. But these were sideshows.America's main foreign-policy challenge was not geopolitical but geo-economic:to chip away the remnants of statism overseas and open the world to marketforces. The IMF and the World Bank were the stick; the prospect of privateinvestment, the carrot. The triumphalists snickered at Europeans who tried tomaintain some semblance of a universal welfare state; Europe would pay for itssins with slower growth.
The globalists also found it risible that countries like France tried toprotect a national culture against the relentless incursion of English or theappeal of America's most loved and hated export industry--Hollywood. Whysubsidize France's film industry when French audiences were voting with theirfeet for American fare, however schlocky? Didn't snobbish high-culture Europeharbor a secret love for blue jeans, Bruce Willis, and le hamburger? The elements of backlash and tribalism were dismissed as minor annoyances--throwbacks. Once everyone became a modern capitalist, people could embrace whatever quaint cultural remnants they desired.
At home, the triumphalists mounted a retrospective assault on liberals, notto mention radicals, for having been inconstant Cold Warriors orblame-America-firsters. Former lefties like Nicholas von Hoffman pronounced thatthe USSR had been an evil empire after all, that Joe McCarthy basically had itright. (Never mind that these very liberals had supported containment ofcommunism but resisted Cold War excesses like Vietnam, blowback such as CIA andFBI infiltration of domestic politics, and the multiple hypocrisies in U.S.foreign policy.)
The final victory over communism also supercharged the right-wing project ofundoing the New Deal and the Great Society. Wasn't it just a slippery slope from,say, Social Security to Sweden to Stalin? To doubters who worried about globalwarming, the triumphalists offered SUVs. You had only to read The Wall StreetJournal editorial page. Didn't everyone want to be like America?
Evidently not. Immediately after September 11, the necessarypolicy seemed both obvious and entirely righteous. With Americans in a state ofjustifiable outrage against an act of plain barbarism, war was a forgoneconclusion. Tactically, there was little doubt that American firepower could blowaway the Taliban. Morally, it was clear that they deserved it. Politically,pacifists and doubters seemed absurdly out of touch.
But a month later, the global situation looks more like the confusion,miscalculation, and unanticipated unraveling of World War I. Second thoughtsabout the wisdom of the bombing look less like naive pacifism and more likerealpolitik. We don't have a clue how to create a stable post-Taliban regime inKabul. In this war, alliances are shifting sands. The enemy of our enemy is notnecessarily our friend (Iran); nor are ostensible friends truly the enemy of ourenemy, as Seymour Hersh documented in his devastating New Yorker piece on Saudiprotection money to bin Laden. Even loyal Pakistan plays footsie with theTaliban.
The collateral damage will be massive--everything from a much more precariousIsrael to the prospect of an India-Pakistan war, to the creation of millions ofstarving refugees. Most explosively, latent mass resentments are now activatedin some of the world's least stable nations. America, it turned out, did not getoff scot-free for propping up one despot after another. Nor did Washington andWall Street get away with decimating East Asian economies in the 1997-1998financial crisis. Inconveniently, these peoples, who were deemed minor casualtiesof newly liberated currencies trading, are also heavily Muslim.
And, irony of ironies, the nation-state is back--for who else can mount anarmy, rebuild an intelligence capacity, and operate a public-health system? Yetthe globalists were all too prescient when they declared the nation-stateovertaken by events. Only it isn't universal capitalism that moots the power ofthe state, but suicide commandos and anthrax letters.
We can't reverse America's global policies of the last half-century. Maybe,though, we can learn a little humility, even as we rise patriotically to thedefense of our country.
