History of the United States 1988-present: Encyclopedia II - History of the United States 1988-present - The George H. W. Bush Administration

History of the United States 1988-present - The George H. W. Bush Administration

Republican President Ronald Reagan's vice-president George H. W. Bush ascended to the presidency, handily defeating Democratic Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election.

History of the United States 1988-present - The End of the Cold War

During the Cold War, the division of the world into two rival blocs had served to legitimize a broad and diffuse alliance not only with the Western European nations of NATO but many countries in the developing world. Starting in the late 1980s, however, the regimes of the Eastern European Warsaw Pact began to collapse in rapid succession. The "fall of the Berlin Wall" was seen as a symbol of the fall of the Eastern European Communist governments in 1989. U.S.-Soviet relations had greatly improved in the latter half of the decade, with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987 and the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan as well as Cuban forces from Angola.

These developments undercut the rationale for providing unconditional support to such repressive governments as those in Chile and South Korea, which underwent processes of democratization with U.S. support during the same period as those of Warsaw Pact nations. Some U.S. commentators believed that this warming of relations between the two greatest powers of the Cold War should lead to a "peace dividend" where U.S. military spending would be drastically reduced. This argument was essentially lost in the political debate with the onset of the Gulf War. Instead, President George H. W. Bush argued for the emergence of "a new world order....freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony."

Nationalist agitation in the Baltic States for independence lead to first Lithuania and then the other two states, Estonia and Latvia, declaring independence from the Soviet Union. On December 26, 1991, the USSR was officially disbanded, breaking up into fifteen constituent parts. The Cold War was over, and the vacuum left by the collapse of governments such as in Yugoslavia and Somalia revealed or reopened other animosities concealed by decades of authoritarian rule. While there was a certain reluctance among the U.S. public, and even within the government, to get involved in localized conflicts in which there was little or no direct U.S. interest at stake, these crises served as a basis for the renewal of Western alliances while communism was becoming less relevant. To this effect, President Bill Clinton would declare in his inaugural address: "Today, as an old order passes, the new world is more free but less stable. Communism's collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers. Clearly America must continue to lead the world we did so much to make."

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has sought to revitalize Cold War institutional structures, especially NATO, as well as multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank through which it promotes economic reforms around the globe. NATO was set to expand initially to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic and has since moved further eastward. In addition, U.S. policy placed a special emphasis on the neoliberal "Washington Consensus," manifesting in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994.

The U.S. often made unilateral moves to economically sanction countries which were said to be sponsoring terrorism, engaging in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or committing serious human rights abuses. There was sometimes a consensus for these moves, such as with the U.S. and European embargoes imposed on arms sales to China after its violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, as well as for the UN Security Council's imposition of sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. Support for other sanctions however, such as the ones levied on Iran and Cuba, were limited, leading Congress to impose measures intended to punish foreign companies which violated the terms of the U.S.'s own laws.

In a 1999 Foreign Affairs essay, Samuel P. Huntington wrote that to reinforce its status in the post-Cold War world,

the United States has, among other things, attempted or been perceived as attempting more or less unilaterally to do the following: pressure other countries to adopt American values and practices regarding human rights and democracy; prevent other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority; enforce American law extraterritorially in other societies; grade countries according to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and now religious freedom; apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets [NAFTA and GATT being the main examples of the free trade policy initiatives of the 1990s]; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve those same corporate interests; intervene in local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; ... ; promote American arms sales abroad while attempting to prevent comparable sales by other countries; force out one U.N. secretary-general and dictate the appointment of his successor; expand NATO initially to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and no one else; undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic sanctions against the regime; and categorize certain countries as 'rogue states,' excluding them from global institutions....¹

Max Boot, another influential contemporary commentator on U.S. policy, argues that the very ambitious goals of the U.S. in the post-Cold War period "aims to instill democracy in lands that have known tyranny, in the hope that doing so will short-circuit terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation." He adds: "This is an ambitious undertaking, the most successful examples of which are post-World War II Germany, ltaly and Japan. In those cases, the US Army helped transform militaristic dictatorships into pillars of liberal democracy—one of the most signficant developments of the twentieth century." [1]

History of the United States 1988-present - The Persian Gulf War

The complete dependence of the industrialized world on oil, much of which resided beneath the surface of Middle Eastern countries, became painfully clear to the U.S. first in the aftermath of the 1973 world oil shock and later in the second energy crisis of 1979. Although in real prices oil fell back to pre-1973 levels through the 1980s, resulting in a windfall for the oil-consuming nations (especially North America, Western Europe, and Japan), the vast reserves of the leading Middle East producers guaranteed the region its strategic importance. By the early 1990s the politics of oil still proved dangerous for all concerned as it did in the early 1970s.

Conflict in the Middle East triggered yet another international crisis on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded and attempted to annex neighboring Kuwait as its nineteenth province. Leading up to the invasion, Iraq complained to the United States Department of State about Kuwaiti slant drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil revenues to pay off its debts and avert an economic crisis. Saddam ordered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, met with Saddam in an emergency meeting, where the Iraqi president stated his intention to continue talks. Iraq and Kuwait then met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait.

U.S. officials feared that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was then on the verge of armed conflict with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Washington's since the 1940s. The Western world condemned the invasion as an act of aggression; U.S. President George H.W. Bush compared Saddam to Hitler and declared that if the United States and international community did not act, aggression would be encouraged elsewhere in the world.

The U.S. and Britain, two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, convinced the Security Council to give Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait. The Western world was determined to not let the Kuwaiti oil supply fall under the control of Saddam, fearing it would have a dire impact on the global economy. Iraq at the time had accumulated a huge foreign debt and was striving to pay off the debts accumulated during the Iraq-Iran War. Perhaps in response, Saddam was pushing oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices and cutback production. Westerners, however, remembered the very destabilizing effects of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.

Saddam ignored the deadline, and the Security Council declared war on Iraq. The war commenced in January 1991, with U.S. troops forming the majority of the coalition which participated in Operation Desert Storm. By the time Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait in late February, Iraq had lost an estimated 20,000 troops, with some sources speaking of as many as 100,000 casualties on the Iraqi side.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The George H. W. Bush Administration", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki