Post–Cold War Era

Post–Cold War Era. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the most momentous developments in modern world history, brought a reorientation in a number of areas of American life. The impact was greatest on foreign policy, as the United States sought a new role in international affairs. But the disappearance of a unifying external threat also led to serious disagreements about domestic policy and contributed to a fragmentation in social and cultural life.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union led to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the creation of often precarious democratic governments. President George Bush spoke hopefully of the dawn of a more stable and peaceful “New World Order,” but he and his successor, Bill Clinton, found themselves confronting an international arena torn by racial, cultural, and religious tensions that sometimes seemed even less stable than before.

Problems surfaced worldwide. Russia moved toward democracy but found the process painful. In Russia and neighboring countries such as Poland, the transition to a free‐market economy caused serious shortages and dislocations that threatened political and social stability. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proved unable to contain the forces of change he had helped set in motion, and his successor, an increasingly frail Boris Yeltsin, struggled constantly with his opponents for political control. Former spy Vladimir Putin replaced Yeltsin in 1999, restoring a degree of stability, but deepening doubts about the future of democracy in the former Soviet state. In what was formerly Yugoslavia, long‐submerged ethnic hostility burst forth with the collapse of central authority and violence escalated.

The Middle East was similarly turbulent. Here, too, the United States hoped to preserve stability as the Cold War ended. President Bush mobilized a military coalition against Iraq when its ruler Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. With the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, American leaders sought to promote peace between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and in a dramatic White House ceremony managed to get PLO leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to shake hands, only to watch the tenuous agreement later unravel. A further round of talks between Israeli leaders and the Palestinians initiated by President Clinton in 2000 proved equally inconclusive.

In Africa, the end of the Cold War created a vacuum. In South Africa, the Western‐aided struggle against apartheid succeeded and Nelson Mandela created a multiracial state. But elsewhere, dictators long propped up by the United States for their value in the struggle against communism now found themselves vulnerable. Without Western support, such countries as Somalia and Zaire descended into chaos and intertribal conflict, often with horrendous loss of life. Here, as elsewhere, the United States found it difficult to maintain the stability it sought.

This unsettled world situation posed difficult questions for the United States. What kind of leadership would America exert as the world's one remaining superpower? How actively would it support the United Nations and participate in international peacekeeping missions? And what kind of assistance would it extend to developing nations absent the Cold War competition that had fueled foreign aid? Increasingly in the post–Cold War Era, Washington concentrated on promoting America's global trading interests, including trade with former adversaries such as China.

Domestically, the conservative transformation that had taken place in the Ronald Reagan and Bush years increasingly influenced public policy. The coalition of religious fundamentalists, free‐market advocates, and politicians who decried pornography as well as preferential treatment for minorities proved increasingly successful at the polls. Though Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections for the first time in more than forty years. Newt Gingrich, an aggressive Georgia congressman who became the new Speaker of the House, championed a Republican “Contract with America” to scale back the role of the federal government, eliminate burdensome regulations, balance the budget, and reduce taxes. Though the House passed some of the measures proposed in the “Contract with America,” few became law. The Senate resisted some; the president vetoed others. Clinton also stole the Republican's thunder by moving skillfully to the political right, thereby securing his own reelection in 1996. Clinton was aided as well by the booming prosperity, low inflation, and surging stock market that characterized the American economy throughout most of the 1990s.

With these changes, the president and Congress weakened the commitment to the welfare state dating back to the New Deal Era. In a welfare‐reform law agreed upon by Clinton and the Republican Congress in 1996, Washington scaled back or eliminated federal assistance programs and turned much of the responsibility for welfare policy over to the states, operating with sharply reduced federal block grants. While welfare reform proved popular, it left many Americans without needed help.

The attack on the welfare state paralleled a diminished commitment to social reform. Enough had been done already for the disadvantaged groups in American society, conservatives argued; middle‐class Americans were suffering from such efforts and deserved an end to intrusive federal policies that they believed hampered them from getting ahead.

The federal commitment to civil rights diminished as conservative judicial appointees reinterpreted the law. In 1992, the Supreme Court's Freeman v. Pitts decision granted a suburban Atlanta school board relief from a desegregation order by arguing that it was not possible to counteract major demographic shifts. Three years later, in 1995, the Court let stand a lower court ruling prohibiting colleges and universities from awarding special scholarships to African Americans and other minorities.

These years saw an even stronger backlash against affirmative action programs. Conservatives, energized by their political victories in 1994, launched a powerful attack on the policy of giving preference in hiring or promotion to groups that had suffered discrimination in the past. Arguing that government officials had never intended for these policies to become permanent, conservatives called for their elimination. In California, voters voiced their opposition to affirmative action in 1996 by approving Proposition 209, prohibiting preferential treatment based on gender or race.

Other groups faced a similar backlash. Hispanic Americans and Native Americans, unemployed in far greater numbers than whites, suffered from the erosion of affirmative action. Though President Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the Supreme Court, women still faced a “glass ceiling” in their efforts to rise to the top of American corporations and watched as state and federal courts continued to chip away at women's right to abortion affirmed by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973).

Post–Cold War America also saw an upsurge of the anti‐immigrant feeling that had reverberated so loudly in the past, expressed in strenuous efforts to halt illegal immigration and to lower annual quotas for new arrivals. In 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, which required teachers and clinic doctors to deny assistance to illegal aliens and report them to government authorities. Other states moved to follow suit. In 1996, a new federal immigration law expanded the list of crimes for which legal resident aliens could be deported, regardless of when the crime was committed. It also provided for a policy of “expedited removal,” whereby aliens could be deported immediately, and banned from reentry for five years, on instructions from a single immigration agent, without a hearing or judicial review by a judge.

The post–Cold War Era also brought “culture wars”: bitter disagreements over basic values, from abortion and homosexuality to Creationism, gun control, censorship of the mass media, and prayer in the schools. An exhibition planned by the Smithsonian Institution to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bombs (1945) set off a fierce debate that finally reached the halls of Congress. Veterans convinced that the atomic bomb had saved their lives by preventing an invasion of Japan fought furiously with historians who had studied the reasons the bombs were used. In the end, the Smithsonian canceled the larger exhibition and simply put the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the plane that had carried the Hiroshima bomb, on display. At the same time, the public became polarized over the question of national history standards that could guide public‐school teachers. In both of these conflicts, the underlying issue was whose version of the past would prevail. Some observers linked these debates directly to the end of the Cold War. The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the struggle that for fifty years had consumed America's economic and emotional resources had eliminated the external focus of hostility, they argued; now some of that tension and hostility turned inward, as the nation attempted in so many different areas to define a new role.

The U.S. economy and the stock market enjoyed a sustained boom in the 1990s, but an undercurrent of uneasiness could also be detected. As America became increasingly multicultural and multiethnic, urgent public‐policy issues clamored for attention, including long term environmental concerns, genetic engineering, and health‐care costs associated with an aging population. An emerging global economy of multinational corporations and mass‐entertainment conglomerates, as well as an array of new electronic technologies—from cellular phones to the burgeoning Internet, heralded social and cultural changes whose contours could barely be discerned as the twenty‐first century dawned.

In the quadrennial election year 2000, the Democrats nominated President Clinton's vice‐president, Albert (Al) Gore Jr. (1948– ), a former senator from Tennessee and the son of a Tennessee senator. As his running mate, Gore broke precedent by selecting Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the first person of the Jewish faith to be nominated on a national party ticket. The Republicans, too, turned to an established political family, nominating Texas governor George W. Bush (1946– ), the son of former president George Bush. As his running mate, Bush chose Dick Cheney, a conservative former congressman who had served his father as secretary of defense.

The election was one of the closest in U.S. history. Gore won the popular vote by a margin of some 263,000, but the Electoral College outcome depended on the extremely close Florida vote. When Gore's legal battle to secure a hand recount in some counties failed, Bush won Florida and the presidency.

With the dawn of a new century, key trends of recent years continued. Demographically, the South, Southwest, and Pacific Coast continued to grow, with declines or modest growth elsewhere. As the baby-boom generation reached retirement age, Social Security, Medicare, and health-care institutions faced strains. The swelling ranks of newcomers from Asia and Latin America changed the nation's ethnic profile. In 2003, Hispanic Americans surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority.

Politically, the administration of President George W. Bush perpetuated and consolidated the nation's long-term conservative trend. On a wide range of issues, from abortion and gay marriage to tax support for church-based schools and social agencies, Bush espoused positions congenial to a growing and politically potent bloc of conservative Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists.

The economic boom of the 1990s ended abruptly as the stock-market bubble burst in 2001, leading to three years of recession, job loss, and weak recovery. Like President Reagan in the 1980s, George W. Bush's panacea for most economic problems was tax cuts, and Congress obliged in 2001 with a $1.35 trillion tax cut spread over ten years. As federal revenues declined and government spending increased, the budget deficit ballooned, with worse ahead as mandated spending on various entitlement programs increased. Even some conservative Republicans questioned the priorities of an administration that seemed more preoccupied with short-term political gain than long-term economic stability.

In foreign policy, the Bush administration reversed the internationalist thrust of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, when Democratic and Republican administrations alike had focused on building alliances, cooperating with the United Nations, and cultivating goodwill in the world. Under Bush and top administration figures such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and a number of Rumsfeld's subordinates, the United States adopted a unilateralist approach, downgrading the UN, disdaining world opinion, and even alienating close allies such as France and Germany.

The administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a major turning point in the nation's history, placed these tendencies on stark display. Launching a sweeping and open-ended War on Terrorism, portrayed in quasi-religious terms, the administration at first enjoyed broad international support when it attacked the Afghan bases of Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the 9/11 attack, and overthrew Afghanistan's radical Islamic Taliban regime in the process. But the administration's next move, the Iraq War of 2003, stirred broad condemnation at the UN and even among America's NATO allies. America's isolation in world opinion deepened when the principal rationale for the war, the alleged horde of weapons of mass destruction held by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, proved baseless, and when Iraq sank into chaos rather than moving smoothly to a democratic regime as the administration had predicted. The administration's apparent inability to reverse the deterioration of relations between its ally Israel and Israel's Palestinian and Arab neighbors further alienated opinion in Europe and the Middle East. As the new century unfolded, the post-Cold War era, initially so full of hope and promise, seemed increasingly characterized by widening cultural rifts at home and accumulating problems abroad.
See also Business Cycle; Computers; Conservatism; Cultural Pluralism; Evolution, Theory of; Foreign Relations; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Global Economy, America and the; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of; Indian History and Culture: Since 1950; Multinational Enterprises; North American Free Trade Agreement; Postmodernism; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rickman, eds., The Bush Presidency: First Appraisals, 1991.
Christopher Jencks , Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass, 1992.
Walter LaFeber , America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992, 7th ed., 1993.
Ronald Takaki , A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 1993.
John Hope Franklin and and Alfred A. Moss Jr. , From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed., 1994.
Geir Lundestad, ed., The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy, 1994.
David G. Gutiérrez , Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Identity, 1995.
David Moraniss , First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton, 1995.
Ronald Steel , Temptations of a Superpower, 1995.

Allan M. Winkler

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer