The Year that Changed the World (33 page)

As I surveyed this epic and extravagant tableau, I couldn't help but wonder what it had to do with George H. W. Bush. This was a man, after all, who in the middle of the most dramatic events of the past half century worked so skillfully to keep the drama of Eastern Europe's revolutions from cascading into a broader East-West crisis. He shunned inflammatory rhetoric. He avoided rubbing Moscow's face in the reality of its collapsing empire and, indeed, went out of his way to engage America's erstwhile enemy in the responsible management of the Cold War's end, most masterfully in negotiating German reunification and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from central Europe. In other words, he disdained the crass triumphalism that today pervades his own library. What happened? Who hijacked George H. W. Bush's legacy? We might as well ask who hijacked American foreign policy.

The easy answer, embraced by many, is George W. Bush and the swaggering band of neocons who took us into Iraq. The truth, of course, is more complicated. Bush junior came to power at the dawn of the new millennium—January 20, 2001. Savoring the calendrical symmetry, he sought to portray himself and his administration as a breed apart from his last-century predecessors. He took office speaking of a “humble” America, one that played well with others. Yet he made clear that he hoped to break the mold of past presidencies, defined as he saw it by inertia and an unwillingness to make tough decisions. Most particularly, he shunned the restraint and caution of his father. His administration, he promised, would be defined by boldness and big thinking. It would, he liked to say, leave a “big footprint.”

It's tempting to find in this the early signs of hubris, a classically Greek presentiment of decline and fall. Yet for all his rhetoric, it would be a mistake to see George W. Bush as representing a sharp break with the past. He was, rather, the extreme end of a continuum, the culminating expression of a deeper and more general and ultimately very American way of seeing the world.

It is eerie, and unsettling, the contrast between father and son. In the aftermath of 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, the administration of George H. W. Bush was distinguished by its collective cool. Partly because of who he was, and partly because his worldview was so shaped by the Cold War, the elder Bush recognized—and accepted—the limits of American power. The United States may have emerged as the world's preeminent military and economic power, but that did not mean it could cut loose from its traditional moorings in the larger world. His New World Order had America at its center, but only as first among equals.

This sense of proportion—of geopolitical “place”—found expression first in his administration's deft handling of the potentially explosive issue of German unification. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher viscerally opposed it. So did the French under President François Mitterrand. Other European countries were similarly wary, not least the Soviet Union. Washington was the future Germany's only champion. Without Bush, it would not have come to pass as smoothly and harmoniously as it did.

Then came the horror of Yugoslavia. If you were on the ground, as I was in the early 1990s, you saw the war in the Balkans for what it was: a manufactured conflict, orchestrated by nationalist politicians in Zagreb and Belgrade. But from afar, and especially in the United States, it looked quite different. Reporters confused by the country's ethnic complexity reduced it to a stick-figure analogy. The civil war in Yugoslavia, most wrote, was the product of “ancient ethnic hatreds,” unleashed with the collapse of communism and thousands of years in the making, as inexplicable and irresolvable as our own legendary feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

In fact, the Balkan holocaust might have been prevented. Early on, the thugs plotting war could have been confronted. But Europe would have had to do it, acting in concert with the United States and NATO,
and that was not yet in the cards. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration read the situation and stood back. “We don't have a dog in that fight,” said James Baker. In any case, the first Iraq war shifted the world's focus. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush declared, “This shall not stand.” But he did not go on to Baghdad, fearing to embroil U.S. troops in a Middle East civil war from which there might be no exit. Hard-line conservatives never forgave him. Bush, as they saw it, was “pusillanimous” and “weak.” At the time, the decision to stop the war echoed what
Newsweek
's editors once memorably dubbed “The Wimp Factor.” With two decades' hindsight, however, Bush's restraint might go by another name—judgment, perhaps, or wisdom.

This sense of moderation, of national place in the world, did not last long. As early as 1990, Charles Krauthammer made a mark with an essay on the United States in a post–Cold War world. The end of communism, he argued, did away with the old order of checks and balances of power among allies and enemies. In this new “unipolar world,” as he called it, America could act with unfettered sway. Krauthammer might have been a neoconservative commentator, but his ideas reflected the temper of the time. Flush with Cold War victory, Americans of every political stripe embraced this robust new vision of the United States and its role in the world. If Bill Clinton won the White House on a domestic rather than a foreign policy agenda, he soon changed hats. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke of America as the “indispensable nation,” without which no good could happen. It was a nation with a mission, a manifest destiny stretching back over centuries, under Democratic presidents and Republican, from Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's denunciations of colonialism and empire to Jimmy Carter's campaigns for global human rights. “We stand tall,” Albright said. “We see further into the future.” It was our duty, as Americans, to carry freedom and democracy forward into the world. “Humanitarian intervention” gained new currency, as international law and as U.S. policy, in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

During these years, the rest of the world began to view American power with misgiving. Europeans accused Washington of throwing its weight around. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine dubbed
America the “hyperpower,” riding roughshod over the sensibilities and interests of others. Samuel P. Huntington, author of a 1996 bestseller,
The Clash of Civilizations,
decried Clinton administration officials who “boast[ed] of American power and American virtue” and “lectur[ed] other countries on the universal validity of American principles, practices and institutions.” Public intellectuals from Ronald Steel (
Temptations of a Superpower
) to Robert W. Tucker (
The Imperial Temptation
) warned against the perils of U.S. triumphalism. Chronicling this history in
World Affairs,
Robert Kagan pointedly noted that the epithets
hegemonic
and
unilateral
were first thrown at the United States during the Clinton era, not that of George W. Bush.

All this became magnified under the second Bush administration, particularly after September 11. Just as the new president took office modeling himself on Ronald Reagan, so did many senior officials around him, few more happily than those who had been marginalized during Reagan's later years, or marginalized once more under the first Bush administration. Born-again, they resurrected the in-your-face rhetoric of early Reagan and amped it up. They made his myth—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—into operational dictum. Traditional American idealism—the United States as a lamp unto nations, enjoying a special providence—morphed into a crude Manichaean dialectic: good versus evil, us versus them. Confrontation clothed as strength through power became the order of the day. Diplomatic “engagement” was for wimps, a form of modern “appeasement.” Impatient with the perceived irresolution and half measures of the previous Bush and Clinton administrations, they wanted action—real solutions, not Band-Aids—and they derided those who thought differently.

Years ago, I remember reading an exchange between a writer for the
New York Times Magazine,
Ron Suskind, and a senior Bush administration official. You guys, meaning reporters like me, you live in the “reality-based” world, the adviser famously told him with sheer condescension. By contrast, the aide went on, the Bush team moved in the faith-based world, a sphere where American might was transformative. “We are an empire now,” the man said. “We create our own reality.” In this brave new world, the United States was free of the constraints and limitations that bound normal nations. Again Ronald
Reagan was the exemplar. He confronted the Evil Empire and the Berlin Wall fell. He ran an arms race that the Soviets could not afford, and communism crumbled. He confronted dictators, and they backed off. Their people, emboldened, rose up and democracy bloomed. It would take more than a decade for this vision of history to find its fullest expression in the faith-based foreign policy of George W. Bush, and it could be summed up simply: If you are America, you have only to will something for it to be. Stand up and confront the enemy, whoever he may be, and he will back down or collapse, by definition hollow at the core. This was the new American era.

Among the many problems with this worldview, none was more serious than the simple fact that it was a self-defeating fantasy. As we have seen, the myth that Americans spun around 1989—confront and they will fall—bore little resemblance to how the Cold War actually ended. The regimes of Eastern Europe were indeed rotten at the core. But the push to collapse came less from the outside than from within. Once the containing pressure of the Soviet system was lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev, they essentially imploded. This is not to diminish Ronald Reagan's contribution to ending the Cold War. To the contrary, it is important to recognize how he did so: not by uncompromising Manichaean confrontation, as many in the Bush administration believed, but by engagement. He embraced Gorbachev as a reformer, a potential partner in peace, and that made all the difference.

Mistaking cause and effect was the single most critical misreading of the lessons of 1989, and tragically costly. For it was a straight line from the fantasy of Cold War victory to the invasion of Iraq. Convinced that freedom could be won there as easily as it was in Eastern Europe, and that it need only confront the tyrant, the Bush administration scarcely bothered to plan for the aftermath of the war. There was no blueprint for building democracy. Little forethought was given to ruling the country during a transition to self-governance, nor to the hard work of creating institutions of civil society and the rule of law or even a functioning economy. The result was a loss of lives and fortune that will heavily weigh for decades to come.

Worse, it blinded Americans to the realities of a dramatically changing world. In recent years, the United States behaved less as an
unchallengeable superpower than some oddly enfeebled giant, besieged by enemies. It increased defense spending by a quarter of a trillion dollars since 2001—more than the combined military budgets of China, India, Britain, and Russia. It waged a global war on terror despite the lack of subsequent attacks in the United States, and despite clear evidence that well-coordinated international police action is more effective in combating terrorism than aircraft carriers or bunker-buster bombs. It confronted North Korea and Iran—the remaining members of the once-vaunted “Axis of Evil”—as though these geopolitical bit players were existential threats to the nation. It frittered away billions upon billions of dollars, largely without accounting or responsible management, as though military might somehow meant that money grew on trees and that, as vice president Cheney memorably put it, “deficits don't matter.”

Along the way, it all but missed the great transformation going on around it—one made possible by the end of the Cold War. In a recent book,
The Post-American World,
my
Newsweek
colleague Fareed Zakaria artfully dubbed this the “rise of the rest,” the story of how global economic growth has changed the world. Japan was the first non-Western nation to awaken, then China, India and the rest of Southeast Asia, not to mention the emerging economies of the Americas. Today these newcomers wield substantial power of their own, and their rise makes the world a very different place from what it was even half a decade ago, let alone in 1989. Since the turn of the millennium, the U.S. share of world GDP has declined from 36 percent to 28 percent; that of China, India, Russia and Brazil has more than doubled to 16 percent. Meanwhile, America's low-cost industrial base and back-office services shifted to factories in Guangzhou and call centers in Hyderabad. China's foreign exchange reserves rose from $200 billion in 2001 to $1.8 trillion in 2008; India's have gone from $50 billion to $300 billion. Thanks to low savings at home, the U.S. government relies more and more on overseas borrowing to finance everything from Social Security and Medicaid to the ongoing war in Iraq. Europe has become a bigger market than the United States. The world's biggest banks are increasingly Arab and Chinese. You have only to look for the world's tallest buildings to appreciate, symbolically, how much has changed. Forget New York. Think Shanghai.

The crash of 2008 will not change this fundamental dynamic. As the United States and Europe slide into recession, virtually all global economic growth will come from Asia, possibly for years to come. Though hurt by the crisis, the economic and financial power of China, India and other formerly “emerging” nations will grow relative to that of the United States. All this will accelerate the trend away from the America-centric world that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it will unfold in ways that are difficult to predict. Even amid the worst days of the Iraq war, when the world's anger at U.S. foreign policy was at fever pitch, people everywhere retained their faith in one thing quintessentially American: its economy. Nothing could rival it as an engine for growth, prosperity and innovation. Its capital markets ruled the world; its entrepreneurial and technological prowess was unchallenged. For nations rich and poor, there was but one path for economic and social advancement. That was the American model.