Imperial Overstretch after the Cold War
To many observers, the end of the Cold War marked the final victory of the American imperium. Francis Fukuyama was perhaps a little more triumphalist than most when he proclaimed “the end of history,” but he was by no means alone.[2861] What Fukuyama, who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.
W. Bush, meant was that over the course of the twentieth century liberal- democratic capitalism had seen off several rival power centers, and their underlying ideologies, for the leadership of world order: European colonialism and mercantilism, British imperial preference, Italian fascism, German Nazism, Japanese expansionism, and communist internationalism. By 1991, the Soviet Union had shattered into 15 autonomous states and the People's Republic of China was in the midst of enthusiastically transforming itself into a market economy. Democracy still did not flourish everywhere (and certainly not in China), but it was spreading rapidly. On the whole, then, Americans had good reason to be confident in the wake of their victory in the Cold War. According to one observer in the year 2000, “the United States leads its nearest rival by a larger margin than has any other leading state in the last three centuries.”[2862]However, Americans who expected to retire from their global imperial role and cash in on a “peace dividend” were soon disappointed. As President George H. W. Bush replied to an interviewer who suggested that the government could spend more on domestic priorities now that the Cold War was over, “when you mention ‘peace dividend,’ there’s almost a... well, there’s an uncalled-for euphoria in some quarters now that suggests that events where they stand today means that the United States can recklessly—in my view—recklessly cut its defense spending. And we are not in that posture.”[2863] The American imperium may have triumphed over its communist rival, but it was by no means free from its imperial role.
As the guarantor of a world system it had created in the 1940s and from which it had benefited greatly, the United States could not now simply escape the burdens of its global imperium. Yet this was the age of the “hyperpower,” as French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine described the United States in 1999, and with no other superpower to balance against it, Americans faced fewer constraints in bearing those burdens.[2864]This helps explain why the frequency of American intervention overseas actually increased with the end of the Cold War.[2865] From the invasion of Panama in 1989 to the bombing of Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq in 2014-2015, after the Cold War there was rarely a year in which US forces were not sent into action overseas, often to enact “regime change,” in George W. Bush’s phrase, by toppling a foreign leader and replacing him with a more pliant option. US troops landed in several countries either to overthrow a leader, install a rival, or both, including Panama (1989), Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003); US warplanes, usually working in tandem with local ground forces, achieved a similar end in Bosnia (1995), Serbia (1999), and Libya (2011). Other stakeholders in the American imperium often accompanied US forces in these operations, but they were rarely more than token allies and provided symbolic political legitimacy rather than important contributions to the course of military events: thus interventions in Iraq (1991) and Haiti were sanctioned by the UN; the bombing of Bosnia, Serbia, and Libya, as well as the invasion of Afghanistan, were official NATO campaigns; and while neither the UN nor NATO granted approval, several allies participated in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
At the same time, in the realm of international political economy, President Bill Clinton used the power of the US Treasury, as well as America's commanding leverage with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to forge the “Washington consensus” based on the worldwide spread of free markets, privatization, financial and industrial deregulation, and floating exchange rates.
This marked the culmination of economic trends since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the deindustrialization of major Western economies, especially America's, in the 20 years that followed.[2866] As with America's rise to globalism a half-century before, the advent of globalization and the Washington consensus was not incidental or inadvertent. It was instead a deliberate project, described in 1993 by Tony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, as a “strategy of enlargement— enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies.”[2867] After the Cold War, major US-led economic interventions in Mexico, Argentina, Russia, and several countries in Southeast Asia paralleled military intervention to help maintain a liberal international order.[2868]