became richer and therefore more powerful, were less willing to follow the
US lead in world events, especially since, by the 1960s, the Cold War had
settled down into a predictable and reasonably stable pattern of relations in
which the genuine fears of the early 1950s subsided. Finally, the soft power
of the US began to wane once the immediate post-war period had passed.
The cultural confidence of Western Europeans recovered along with their
wealth, and as the US increasing took over from
the UK the role of leading
opponent of the Soviet Union, the subservient communist parties of France
and Italy became increasingly anti-American. Later, once the US began to
act like a dominant great power, using its military might to preserve its posi-
tion in Central America, and especially acting as a replacement for French
power in Southeast Asia, the broadly positive perception
of America held by
non-communists became more difficult to sustain. Whereas in the 1950s
rock and roll preserved the dominance of American popular culture, in the
1960s British youngsters at least had many alternative role models, while in
the US itself youth culture turned anti-establishment in the wake of Vietnam
and the Civil Rights Movement.
All told, by the early 1970s the US was certainly the most powerful state in
the world, but talk of an American century had become highly unfashionable.
To all intents and purposes, the US was defeated in Vietnam,
and its military
was demoralized and ineffective; the shambolic failure of the mission to rescue
American hostages held in Iran in 1980 probably cost President Jimmy Carter
re-election, and certainly revealed how deep the crisis in the American military
had penetrated. Ten years later, things looked very different. First, the context
of grand strategy changed dramatically. For a variety of reasons, in the 1990s
the Soviet Union imploded – American strategy under President Ronald
Reagan
certainly contributed to this, both by helping local guerrillas to ensure
that Afghanistan, invaded by the Soviets in 1999, would become its Vietnam,
but also by supporting levels of arms spending on high-tech weaponry that the
Soviets simply couldn’t match, but internal factors, a lack of political legiti-
macy and the inability of a command economy to handle the level of com-
plexity to be found in a modern,
postindustrial economy, combined with the
emergence of a leader prepared to recognize these realities, were probably deci-
sive. Moreover, the US managed the end of the Cold War very skilfully;
rather than go for short-term advantage, Reagan and his successor, George
H. W. Bush, sought consensus with first
Mikhail Gorbachev and then, when
the strategy of holding together the USSR failed, with the President of the new
Russian state, Boris Yeltsin. This strategy paid off in the first Gulf War of
1990/91 where the US led the first UN legitimized military campaign to turn
back aggression since the Korean War forty years before – and one that was
based on a far higher degree of consensus than the earlier conflict.
The American economy remained somewhat in the doldrums in 1990,
although it was about to outstrip its major competitors as a result of Japan’s
234
Understanding International Relations
problems in the 1990s and its own high growth rate, but even so, US
dominance
of the critical postindustrial, information technology based sector
was increasingly apparent. Moreover, American popular culture dominated
the new entertainment media; sadly, Willis Connover was supplanted by
MTV and
Baywatch, but the power of the new media to shape people’s
minds was clear, as was the dominance of the US in the new field of info-
tainment, with the rise of CNN. All told, one
might have felt that now was
a good time to declare a new American century – but, in fact, the reaction
to these developments was strangely muted. Francis Fukuyama gave the
most powerful account of the significance of liberal democracy’s defeat of
communism with his thesis of ‘The End of History’ (see Chapter 10), but it
is striking how few takers he had for this position (Fukuyama 1989, 1992).
Instead the more popular study was Paul Kennedy’s historical work,
The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988) which, building on the ‘declinist’
literature of the 1980s, warned the US of the dangers of inevitable imperial
overstretch – its popularity was seemingly unaffected by the fact that it
appeared at just the point when the US had achieved
virtually all its strategic
goals of the previous forty years. Rather than triumphalism, the mood of
the time in the US academy is better caught by the implausibly titled
We All
Lost the Cold War (Lebow and Stein 1994).
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
