Over the past two decades the United States has changed in fundamental ways. The exaggerated expectations of the 1990s gave way to growing cynicism and political discord and division in the new millennium’s first decade. Still, there are a few encouraging developments. All hope is not lost.
Nearly nine years ago the United States suffered a terrorist attack whose ramifications are still being felt today, and that is likely to shape American society for years to come. It is impossible to understand the two current wars, Iraq and Afghanistan (now the longest in US history) – not to mention frequent military strikes in Pakistan — without recognizing how the sense of US innocence and invulnerability was shattered on September 11, 2001.
And yet the war in Afghanistan is increasingly unpopular and its outcome uncertain. The so-called “war on terror”, launched with great fanfare by George W. Bush, is widely questioned, its meaning less and less clear. There is a great deal of confusion about the US’s role in the world and the country’s needs and priorities. That is precisely the void that, for US society — and for much of the world — was supposed to be filled by Barack Obama when he became president in January 2009.
The US was not always trying to fill the vacuum. Indeed, for all of its costly, often tragic, mistakes (many of them in Latin America and the Caribbean), the Cold War provided a certain measure of conceptual coherence and clarity for US decisions in the world. Whether justified or not, American society was driven by an ideological battle and was determined to defeat communism. That motivation, that impulse, took precedence over everything else.
In the 1990s, first under the administration of George H.W. Bush and then for much of Bill Clinton’s era, the US seemed to be riding high, having seen the Soviet empire virtually implode, leaving what some analysts described as a “unipolar” world. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this moment was found in Francis Fukuyama’s classic The End of History, published in 1992, that celebrated the triumph of democracy and capitalism throughout the world.
In this context there was a great deal of optimism about the post Cold War world, a period that would, it was generally believed, yield a “peace dividend” and would witness the construction of a “new world order,” anchored in multilateral cooperation and deepening democracies — with the US leading the way through example and enlightened diplomacy. Of course, it eventually became clear that the national mood of this odd interregnum was illusory and naïve and would give way to a fiercely contentious and conflictive world disorder.
In his recent book, The Icarus Syndrome: The History of American Hubris, political commentator Peter Beinart argues persuasively that it was precisely the successive “victories” following the end of the Cold War – beginning with the US military invasion of Panama in 1989 and the 1991 Gulf War under Bush (father) and continuing with Haiti and Bosnia and Kosovo under Clinton – that laid the groundwork and created the psychology that the US had virtually unlimited power to remake the world and could accomplish whatever foreign policy goal it set. Such arrogance was on full display after the terrorist attacks on US soil, and particularly what turned out to be arguably one of the worst foreign policy disasters in US history – the terribly misguided war in Iraq. George Bush, who ironically had promised in the 2000 presidential campaign a more “humble” foreign policy, presided over such an imperious, unilateral misadventure in Iraq.
Of course, it was Obama and his message of hope that represented an alternative, compelling vision of change. But Obama inherited a terrible mess, not just two wars and historically low US standing throughout the world, but an economic crisis that risked becoming another Great Depression. The collapse of the housing market was particularly devastating for many Americans, whose main equity was in their home, long considered a secure investment for the future. Wall Street joined Washington as targets of widespread public resentment and contempt. This year they were compounded by the negligence of BP in the unprecedented environmental and economic disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In all of these cases, Obama has been caught in a difficult bind. On the one hand, he has had to be forceful in criticizing Washington and Wall Street and BP but at the same time he needed to work with all of them to solve the problems they were responsible for. If he wasn’t sufficiently forceful he would alienate his Democratic base and yet if he were too severe he would antagonize some key pillars of the “establishment” whose cooperation was crucial to tackle his agenda successfully.
As a result, despite Obama’s success in avoiding another Depression and the US’s improved image and standing in the world, many Americans are disappointed. Unemployment, almost 10%, remains high, and the fruits of the “stimulus bill” and health care reform are not clear. Looking ahead to November’s mid-term legislative elections, the enthusiasm is behind the Republicans, who will surely gain seats in Congress and may win a majority in the House of Representatives.
Indeed, Obama also inherited an increasingly dysfunctional political system, marked by greater partisan rancor and a notable absence of moderation and spirit of compromise. For all of Obama’s political gifts – and his pledge to change “politics as usual” — he has not been able to remedy this problem, which has been getting worse over the past two decades.
Obama’s governing task has been made more complicated by other long-term trends. No one refers to the US preeminence in the world today without mentioning the fundamental role of China, as well as other ascendant regional powers such as India, Russia and Brazil. The US may not have declined in absolute terms, but it has relatively, as Fareed Zakaria argues in The Post-American World. Brazil’s activism on sensitive global questions like Iran’s nuclear program would have been hard to imagine two decades ago. Washington’s capacity to affect situations in the world – from Israel to Afghanistan and, even closer to home, Honduras – is surely not as strong as it was right after the Cold War.
The changing global power shifts — and the US position in that scenario – have contributed to growing anxiety in the public mood, reflected in deep societal doubts about free trade and open immigration (the recent, controversial Arizona law is an example of such a reaction). These concerns help explain why some of the goals (eg. Free Trade Area of the Americas) outlined in Washington in the early 1990s were thwarted. Two decades ago such aims seemed realistic; today they seem fanciful.
Obama has also had to deal with and try to redress another long-term trend in US society: growing economic and social inequality. Statistics vary but no one disputes that in the past three decades the gap between the rich and poor has increased and poses a major problem for American society. Acute inequalities impede economic growth and breed social resentments, profoundly affecting the quality of life in the US.
These challenges have tested Obama’s formidable problem-solving skills. There are, however, a few bright spots in an otherwise sobering outlook that reveal how far the US has advanced since 1990. It is hard to believe that Obama, the first African-American US president, would have had a chance to be elected two decades ago. US attitudes on social questions like race, and particularly same-sex marriage, have become increasingly tolerant, a shift especially clear among the young. To be sure, such prejudice has not disappeared (and plays a part in the current reaction to Obama), but public opinion surveys point to remarkable progress that deserves to be celebrated.
Another fact of American life is the growing Latino population that already constitutes the largest minority group in the United States. From 1990 to 2010 that population has increased from just over 22 million to nearly 48 million (9 percent to almost 15 percent of total US population). Latin America’s influence in all spheres of American life (reflected, happily, among other things in the proliferation of Peruvian restaurants) is palpable. In each succeeding US election there is more and more emphasis on the importance of the “Latino vote”. Latinos are a political force to be reckoned with.
A final bright spot (not unrelated to the growing “Latinization” of the US) is the manifestly growing appreciation of the “beautiful game” in American society. Never has a World Cup tournament been watched by more Americans, and with greater enthusiasm. Never has a US soccer team been more cheered and applauded. At least in this fundamental respect the US is becoming more aligned with the rest of the world.
