Describing the events of 9/11, President Bush asserted that “All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world.” With these words he reinforced a general perception that the world had changed irrevocably and utterly on one September day in 2001. It was a day we will always remember, and the president was articulating an emotional truth—but not an analytical one.

America Between the Wars shows that America did not change in one day. The tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath had its origins twelve years earlier, when the world really did shift in ways that were incomprehensible at the time. Strangely, the date mirrors a much happier moment: it was November 9, 1989—11/9—when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War was effectively over.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, America and the West declared victory. Democracy and the free market had prevailed, and the United States emerged as the world’s triumphant superpower. The finger-on-the-button tension that had defined an earlier generation was over, and it seemed that long-lasting peace was at hand. The next twelve years passed in a haze of self congratulation and inward preoccupation—what some now mistakenly call a “holiday from history.” When that complacency about the world shattered on September 11, 2001, confused Americans asked themselves: How did we get here?

Renowned foreign policy analysts Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier provide a compelling answer to that question. They blend deep expertise and broad access to the key players across the political spectrum in a narrative about how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today. By doing so, they provide the first book that examines these years as a distinct and decisive era in American history.

America Between the Wars reveals the ways that debates about America’s role in the world framed the intense political struggles between Republicans and Democrats. It is an important inside story of a generation of leaders grappling with a decade of dramatic transformation. This book changes how we should think about the recent past, and uncovers important lessons for the future.