The Rise of the American Security State by M. Kent Bolton

Author:M. Kent Bolton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Praeger

Chapter 5

The Transition from the Cold War to the Post-Cold War Period

The December 1989 Panama invasion, and more importantly the Gulf crisis, changed all that. The military was not going to play a smaller role in the new world, as some had expected. It was moving to center stage.

—Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New Y ork: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 32

This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.

—George H. W. Bush, August 6, 1990

. . . Would the United States return to the 1920s and once again turn its back on the world’s troubles? Or more plausibly, would it return to the 1940s, when World War II ended and the country edged toward new international commitments? If the United States was the only remaining superpower, how should it use its power? Should it reorder the world in its own image? Was America bound to lead, as many argued? Or should the country veer more toward the old isolationist slogan of America First? Some foreign observers, perhaps too mindful of American history, leaped to the erroneous conclusion that isolationism would sweep the country. The London Economist (September 28, 1991) speculated that by the mid-1990s one of the two political parties, probably the Democrats, would be as “committed to isolationism as American parties can be.”

—William G. Hyland, Clinton’s World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (Kindle Locations 41–46)

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