23 - The Illusions of the United States’ Great Power Politics after the Cold War

Summary

For American policymakers, the end of the Cold War was, above all, a self-affirming experience. The four decades of global competition with Soviet communism had cast doubt on whether the United States was the most powerful or most righteous country in the world, but the peaceful and precipitous collapse of communism in the late 1980s appeared to confirm that it was indeed both. Looking to the future in the early 1990s, American policymakers were guided by two steadfast beliefs. First, they believed that the United States should remain the most powerful country in the world, and that American primacy in world affairs would receive the consent of the vast majority of other countries for the foreseeable future. Second, they believed that the United States’ form of political and economic organization – liberal democratic capitalism – was destined to benignly conquer the globe, and that it was the job of the US government to accelerate its expansion.