“An indispensable history of the decade preceding 9/11. You can’t understand today’s American crisis without understanding how we got there. This book tells us, eloquently and compellingly.” —Richard Holbrooke

“This book will likely stand as the definitive work on the politics, people, and ideas involved in the foreign policy debates of the 1990s. It shows how, in the decade before Sept. 11, both Republicans and Democrats, both liberals and conservatives, struggled to come to grips with post–Cold War issues such as the use of military force, the promotion of democracy, and the proper U.S. role in the world. This is a lucidly written history, devoid of rhetoric and full of invaluable information.” —James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans

“America Between the Wars is a deeply researched, well-written account of U.S. foreign policy in the first post-Cold War decade. Authors Chollet and Goldgeier should be commended for being comprehensive and fair-minded. Truly essential reading.” —Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and fellow at the James A . Baker II Institute for Public Policy

“Here is an excellent account of how the United States and the world changed from the conclusion of the Cold War to the Al Qaeda attacks of 2001. The history of diplomacy and international affairs are inseparable from the history of politics; but it is extremely difficult to do them all justice in a single book. Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier not only succeed, they succeed in style—and they provide a persuasive and entirely original way of understanding America’s role in global affairs during a pivotal dozen years.” —Sean Wilentz, professor of history at Princeton University and author of The Age of Reagan

“In America Between the Wars, Goldgeier and Chollet examine the decade between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Twin Towers and offer illuminating insights into the forces that have reshaped today’s world.” —Henry Kissinger

“This book is a gem of current history, a scrupulously fair and highly readable piece of old-fashioned scholarship. Chollet and Goldgeier, two of the most promising young foreign policy experts, now allow us to argue about the ten-year run up to 9/11 and know what we’re talking about.” —Leslie H. Gelb, former New York Times columnist and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations

“Chollet and Goldgeier have written a highly informative, engaging, and accessible account of the period between America’s most recent major wars—the Cold War and the War on Terror. In this balanced and wellwritten story, they argue that 9/11 did not change everything and that in order to analyze America’s challenges today, one must understand the foreign policy debates and clashes of the 1990s.” —Lee H. Hamilton, president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission

Excerpt. Read full review > [PDF, 148KB] America Between the Wars provides a fair-minded and illuminating history of this country’s adventures in world affairs, from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, to al-Qaeda’s attack on America on September 11, 2001—the interwar era, from today’s perspective. —World Affairs

A nation becalmed becomes a nation adrift in this provocative study from the Council on Foreign Relations.

When the Berlin Wall fell, triumphalist commentators declared that the United States and its lesser allies were suddenly free of history: Capitalism had won, peace was ubiquitous and America was the world’s sole superpower. Lately, it seems as if the dozen years between the fall of communism and the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 mark a mere recess. The first Bush administration was not exactly inclined to that triumphalism, write analysts Chollet and Goldgeier, though with the first Gulf War it would “try to turn [the Kuwait] crisis into the conceptual foundation of its post–Cold War foreign policy,” the vaunted and now ethereal “new world order.” This occasioned a sharp division between paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney, the former believing that America was a republic and not an empire, the latter that America’s powerful military privileged the nation to tell the rest of the world how to behave. The Clinton administration was less inclined to commit forces abroad until its second term, when the president seems to have decided that he needed more medals on his legacy, while “his critics complained that the president was trying too hard and getting too involved and, as a result, frittering away the leverage that comes with more selective presidential engagement.” Meanwhile, of course, other enemies were gathering, unleashing their fury on Bush II, who had campaigned sounding like an isolationist but, come 2001, was ready to try on an empire for size—to, it is increasingly clear, tragic ends.

A careful explication of why things are as they are, with all those old arguments continuing to sizzle and pop—suggestive and highly useful for those seeking to reshape policy in the near term. —Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt. Read full review > The title of Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier’s new book, “America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11,” is a clever one, using the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as bookends for a period during which, the authors argue, “the ideas and dynamics that characterize the current era took shape.” It was during this decade, they say, that the consequences of the end of the cold war first unfurled, including “the economic, political, and security challenges created by globalization; the rise of nonstate actors; the threat of weapons of mass destruction; the dangers that emanate from weak or failing states; the possibilities and limits of international institutions; and questions about whether and how to use America’s preponderant power to meet global responsibilities.” In addition,they contend, “the debates that raged both between and within” the Republican and Democratic Parties during the 1990s “shaped their respective responses to 9/11 — and still influence their foreign policy choices” today.

The authors provide an insightful assessment of the competing perspectives within the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush that have continued to inform Washington foreign policy debates through the Iraq war and the current election cycle: the competition between Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s Pentagon team, which argued for an aggressive foreign policy intended to prevent the emergence of global rivals, and Lawrence Eagleburger’s State Department, which promoted a more optimistic vision of American power, based on leading through inspiration and example, instead of fear. The authors shrewdly analyze President Bill Clinton’s grasp of both the upsides and downsides of globalization, which was bringing about the economic and technological integration of the world, even as it was accelerating centrifugal forces of fragmentation. And they explicate the oddly shifting dynamics between the right and left, Republicans and Democrats, which would see both neo-isolationist conservatives and the antiwar left warning about the consequences of American intervention abroad; and neo-conservatives and liberal hawks urging the United States to export its democratic values around the world. —The New York Times

Excerpt. Read full review > In the narrative of contemporary geopolitics, the 1990s are an interlude. Stuff happened: the Soviet Union collapsed, Saddam Hussein was repulsed, Mr Bush Senior declared a new world order and the Balkans fell to bloody chaos. Bill Clinton fumbled before alighting on a doctrine of humanitarian interventionism in Kosovo. For many, though, the history that had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 resumed again only on 9/11.

The authors of this excellent book remind us it was otherwise. Most of the debates that have surrounded US foreign policy during recent years have mirrored the discussions and divisions of the 1990s. Most of the challenges – from globalisation to state failure to nuclear weapons proliferation and the terrorism of al-Qaeda and its affiliates – troubled Mr Clinton. It was his administration that made regime change in Baghdad an explicit aim.

Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, members of the US think-tank establishment, provide a lucid antidote to the year zero approach that defines today’s foreign policy discourse. They also offer a reminder of the constraints, domestic and international, facing the next president.

Studies of US foreign policy in recent years have suffered from an excess of polemic and an absence of cool analysis. This book provides welcome redress. Barack Obama, for one, should put it on his reading list. —The Financial Times

Excerpt. Read full review > America Between the Wars is a remarkably evenhanded and serious review of U.S. security policy between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attacks on New York and the Pentagon in the fall of 2001. Although both Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier held positions in the Clinton administration, the book is no partisan taking of accounts. To the contrary, judicious in tone, and especially insightful about the various meanderings of the political parties during the first decade-plus of the post-Cold War era, this volume will likely stand as the definitive overview of that period for some time to come.

Chollet and Goldgeier, however, are not writing a history for the sake of writing a history. Their larger point is to stress that much (if not most) of what we are dealing with today--whether issues of terrorism, economic globalization, the rise of China, weapons proliferation, the utility of international institutions and our alliances, the possibilities and limits to the exercise of American primacy and leadership--all came to the fore in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Empire. —The Weekly Standard

Excerpt. Read full review > "When our national security interests are threatened," the president said, "we will act with others when we can, but alone if we must. We will use diplomacy when we can, but force if we must."

If you're unsure which U.S. president postulated this formula for his administration's approaches to U.S. foreign policymaking, you might want to read "America Between the Wars," a wonderfully illuminating and timely expose of all you may have forgotten about the policy prescriptions, both foreign and domestic, espoused by leading Democrats and Republicans during the unnamed, uncertain, albeit politically awkward years from "11/9 to 9/11" — the years between the Cold War's conclusion and the horrific events that sparked the American-led War on Terror. —Charleston Post and Courier

Excerpt. Read full review > Bill Clinton desperately wanted a pithy slogan to encapsulate his foreign policy. But nothing worked. “Post cold-war era” was uninspiring. “Democratic enlargement” sounded like an unwelcome medical condition. “Age of hope” was too like the title of a New Age album. “We can litanize and analyze all we want, but until people can say it in a phrase, we’re sunk,” he snapped at his advisers in the fall of 1994.

The president never succeeded. “Containment” of the Soviet Union described policy through the cold war, helping to make a mortal threat seem manageable. For the past seven years, “war on terror” has made a manageable threat seem mortal. The years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 remain nameless.

In “America Between the Wars,” Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier argue that anonymity doesn’t equal irrelevance. The 12-year period may now look like a patternless jumble — Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, Nafta, Rwanda, Seattle, Kosovo — but we can learn much from it. “The challenges confronting America,” the authors write, “did not start on 9/11. They began when the cold war ended a decade earlier.” —The New York Times

Verdict: This is an excellent volume on an era that is still overlooked by historians and political scientists, a circumstance that Chollet and Goldgeiger use to their advantage in their own quest for understanding of this period. Recommended for academic libraries.

Background: Chollet (senior fellow, Ctr. for a New American Security), a former Clinton administration State Department official, and Goldgeier (political science & international affairs, Georgetown Univ.) cover "the misunderstood decade between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror." This period, though detailed in other volumes, is rarely viewed as its own historical period, when the United States sought to refine its place within a world no longer dominated by the Cold War. In chronicling these 12 years, the authors use an abundance of sources, including government documents and their own interviews with insiders, as they track the workings of the world’s sole superpower as it sought to redefine its place, diplomatically and politically, in the world. The author’s look at U.S. foreign policy through the eyes of those who were at the forefront of creating it and redefining America’s role is compelling, enabling readers to understand a society wishing to focus on domestic issues but while working to redefine the defensive and globalization issues so pertinent to the decade that then led to 9/11. Thus was America’s role in global affairs permanently changed. —Library Journal

Excerpt. Read full review > This book is a well-written account of how both major political parties dealt with the changing reality of the end of the Cold War. Did it free us from involvement in world affairs, or was there still an effective and moral role for the U.S. to play?

If that sounds a bit heavy, it is really a refreshing, non-partisan and thoughtful look at a 12-year period during which Americans had to adjust their thinking about the larger world. After the Cold War, it was generally thought that our role would be easier, less challenging.

The authors say of Clinton that he did not spend enough time on foreign policy, and that he was too “uncertain and tentative.” He wanted to support human rights, feed the hungry, promote democracy and stop genocide. But were these in our national interest, especially if they required military intervention? Were they worth American body bags returning from overseas? There were “grave humanitarian consequences of American inaction,” to be sure, but noble aims, such as our attempt at peaceful intervention in Somalia, led to disaster, and Americans were becoming disillusioned. The Cold War was over; why wasn’t the world becoming more peaceful? Why couldn’t the U.S. be at rest? —Lincoln Journal Star

U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s is still a contested topic. For some, the elder Bush and Clinton administrations successfully built a post-Cold War system centered on markets, expanded international cooperation, and the United States' indispensable leadership. For others, the 1990s were a "lost decade" in which a distracted Bill Clinton failed to craft a coherent grand strategy or anticipate the dangers of the coming terrorist era. This splendidly illuminating book chronicles the ups and downs in U.S. diplomacy during these years, providing a nuanced portrait that offers support to both positions. The authors begin their analysis with the first Bush administration's debating how to handle the new windfall of U.S. power in the wake of the Soviet collapse and then follow the early misadventures of the Clinton administration in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia -- and the subsequent successes of the Dayton accords and the war in Kosovo. The overall picture is of a triumphant but slightly bewildered superpower struggling to make its way in a strange new world. The book's most interesting argument is about the surprising continuity that marks the Clinton and George W. Bush years, particularly in fashioning a vision of U.S. interventionism. This book will become the standard account of U.S. foreign policy in the first decade after the Cold War. —Foreign Affairs