| I. The
Rise of the New Right |
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A. |
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan:
Champions of the Right |
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1. |
Ronald Reagan came to national prominence in 1964. Speaking to the Republican
convention on national television, he delivered a powerful speech supporting
the presidential nomination of arch-conservative Barry Goldwater. |
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2. |
His
impassioned rhetoric supporting limited government, low taxation, and law and
order won broad support among citizens of the most populous state and made him
a force in national politics. |
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3. |
Narrowly defeated in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in
1976, Reagan counted on his growing popularity to make him the party’s
candidate in 1980. |
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4. |
In
1964, the conservative message preached by Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater
appealed to few American voters. Then came the series
of events that mobilized opposition to the Democratic Party and its liberal
agenda: a stagnating economy, the failed war in
Vietnam
, African American riots, a
judiciary that legalized abortion and enforced school busing, and an expanded
federal regulatory state. By the mid-1970s, conservatism commanded greater
popular support. |
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B. |
Free-Market Economics and Religious
Conservatism |
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|
1. |
The conservative movement resembled a three-legged stool consisting of
anticommunism, free-market economics, and religious moralism.
Uniting all three in a political coalition was no easy feat. |
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2. |
Religious moralists demanded strong government action to implement their
faith-based agenda, while economic conservatives favored limited government and
free markets. Both groups, however, were ardent anticommunists. In the end, the
success of the New Right would come to depend on balancing the interests of
economic and moral conservatives. |
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3. |
Since the 1950s, William F. Buckley, the founder and editor of the National Review, and Milton Friedman,
the Nobel Prize-winning economist at the
University of
Chicago,
had been the most prominent conservative intellectuals. |
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4. |
Friedman became a national conservative icon with the publication of Capitalism and Freedom (1962). The
Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute
issued policy proposals and attacked liberal legislation and the permissive
culture they claimed it had spawned. |
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5. |
The most striking addition to the conservative
coalition was the Religious Right. The perception that American society had
become immoral, combined with the influence of a new
generation of popular ministers, made politics relevant. Conservative
Protestants and Catholics joined together in a tentative alliance, as the
Religious Right condemned divorce, abortion, premarital sex, and feminism. |
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6. |
Charismatic television evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell emerged as the champions of a morality-based
political agenda during the late 1970s. Falwell established
the Moral Majority in 1979. Backed by behind-the-scenes conservative
strategists such as Paul Weyrich, the Moral Majority
boasted 400,000 members and $1.5 million in contributions in its first year. It
would be the organizational vehicle for transforming the Fourth Great Awakening
into a religious political movement. |
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7. |
Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA, which became Eagle Forum
in 1975, continued to advocate for conservative public policy; Focus on the
Family was founded in 1977; and a succession of conservative organizations
would emerge in the 1980s, including the Family Research Council. |
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8. |
By the late 1970s, the New Right had developed a conservative message that
commanded much greater popular support than Goldwater’s program had. Religious
and free-market conservatives joined with traditional anticommunist hard-liners
in a broad coalition that attacked welfare state liberalism, social
permissiveness, and an allegedly weak and defensive foreign policy. Ronald
Reagan expertly appealed to all of these conservative constituencies and
captured the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. |
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C. |
The Carter Presidential Interregnum |
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1. |
Carter had an idealistic vision of American leadership in world affairs. He
presented himself as the anti-Nixon, a world leader who rejected Henry
Kissinger’s “realism” in favor of human rights and peacemaking. |
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2. |
He withdrew economic and military aid from some repressive regimes, signed a
treaty turning control of the Panama Canal over to
Panama,
and crafted a “framework for peace,” between
Egypt
and
Israel.
While Carter deplored what he called the “inordinate fear of Communism,” his
efforts at improving relations with the
Soviet Union
foundered. |
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3. |
After ordering an embargo on wheat shipments to the Soviet Union and
withdrawing SALT II from Senate consideration, Carter called for increased
defense spending and declared an American boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics
in
Moscow. He
and Congress began providing covert assistance to anti-Soviet fighters in
Afghanistan,
some of whom, including Osama bin Laden, would metamorphose into anti-American
Islamic radicals decades later. |
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4. |
Carter’s ultimate undoing came in
Iran, however. Since the 1940s,
Iran
had been ruled by the Shah (“King”), Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Ousted by a
democratically elected parliament in the early 1950s, Pahlavi sought and
received the assistance of the
CIA,
which helped him reclaim power in 1953. Early in 1979, the Shah was driven into
exile by a revolution that brought the fundamentalist Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. When the
United States
admitted the deposed Shah into the
country for cancer treatment, Iranian students seized the
U.S.
embassy in
Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostages.
The captors demanded that the Shah be returned to
Iran
for trial. Carter refused and instead
suspended arms sales to
Iran
and froze Iranian assets. |
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5. |
For the next fourteen months, the hostage crisis paralyzed Carter’s presidency.
Several months later, however, a stunning development changed the calculus on
both sides:
Iraq, led by
Saddam Hussein, invaded
Iran. |
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6. |
Desperate to focus his nation’s attention on
Iraq
’s
invasion, Khomeini began to talk with the
United States
about releasing the
hostages. The hostages were finally released the day after Carter left office—a
final indignity endured by a well-intentioned but ineffectual president. |
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7. |
President Carter’s sinking popularity hurt his bid for reelection. When he was
barely renominated for the presidency, Carter’s
approval rating was historically low: a mere 21 percent of Americans believed
that he was an effective president. Economically, millions of citizens were
suffering from stagnant wages, high inflation, crippling mortgage rates, and an
unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent. |
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8. |
With Carter on the defensive, Reagan
remained upbeat and decisive. To emphasize his intention to be a formidable
international leader, Reagan hinted that he would take strong action to win the
hostages’ return. To signal his rejection of liberal policies, he declared his
opposition to affirmative action and forced busing and promised to get “the
government off our backs.”.Reagan effectively appealed to the many Americans who felt financially insecure. He emphasized the
hardships facing working- and middle-class Americans in an era of “stagflation” and asked them: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” |
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9. |
Carter received only 41 percent of the vote. Independent candidate John
Anderson garnered 8 percent, and Reagan won with 51 percent of the popular vote.
The Republicans elected thirty-three new members of the House of
Representatives and twelve new senators, which gave them control of the U.S.
Senate for the first time since 1954. |
| II. The Dawning of the Conservative Age |
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A. |
The Reagan Coalition |
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1. |
The core of the Republican Party remained relatively affluent, white,
Protestant voters who supported balanced budgets, opposed government activism,
feared crime and communism, and believed in a strong national defense, but Reagan
Republicanism also attracted middle-class suburbanites and migrants to the
Sunbelt states who endorsed the conservative agenda of
combating crime and limiting social welfare spending. |
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2. |
This emerging Republican coalition was joined by a large and electorally key
group of former Democrats, southern whites, that had been gradually moving
toward the Republican Party since 1964. |
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3. |
Reagan capitalized on the “Southern Strategy” developed by Richard Nixon’s.
Many southern whites had lost confidence in the Democratic Party, but one
factor stood out: the party’s support for civil rights. After 1980, southern
whites would remain a cornerstone of the Republican coalition. |
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4. |
The Religious Right proved crucial to the Republican victory as well. It called
for a constitutional ban on abortion, voluntary prayer in public schools, and a
mandatory death penalty for certain crimes. |
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5. |
Reagan’s broad coalition attracted the allegiance of blue-collar Catholics
alarmed by antiwar protesters and rising welfare expenditures and hostile to
feminist demands. Some observers saw these voters, which many called “Reagan
Democrats,” as coming from the “silent majority” that Nixon had swung into the
Republican fold in 1968 and 1972. They lived in heavily industrialized midwestern states such as
Michigan,
Ohio, and
Illinois and had been a core part of the
Democratic coalition for three decades. |
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6. |
Reagan’s victory in the 1980s hinged on both a revival of right-wing
conservative activism and broad dissatisfaction with liberal Democrats. |
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B. |
Conservatives in Power |
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1. |
In his first year in office, Reagan and his chief advisor, James A. Baker
III, set out to roll back federal taxes, social
welfare spending, and the regulatory bureaucracy. They advocated a vast increase
in defense spending and an end to détente with the
Soviet
Union. To match the resurgent economies of
Germany
and
Japan
, they set out to restore American leadership
of the world’s capitalist societies and to inspire renewed faith in “free
markets.” |
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2. |
To achieve its
economic objectives, the new administration advanced a set of policies,
dubbed “Reaganomics,” to increase the production (and thus, the supply) of
goods. The theory underlying supply-side economics, as this approach was
called, emphasized investment in productive enterprises. |
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3. |
According to supply-side theorists, the best way to bolster investment was to
reduce the taxes paid by corporations and wealthy Americans, who could then use
these funds to expand production. Supply-siders maintained that the resulting
economic expansion would increase government revenues and offset the loss of
tax dollars stemming from the original tax cuts. Meanwhile, the increasing
supply would generate its own demand, as consumers stepped forward to buy ever
more goods. Supply-side theory presumed—in fact, gambled—that future tax
revenues would make up for present tax cuts. |
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4. |
Reagan took advantage of Republican control of the Senate to win congressional
approval of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), a massive tax cut that
embodied supply-side principles. The act reduced income tax rates for most
Americans by 23 percent over three years. For the wealthiest Americans the
highest marginal tax rate dropped from 70 to 50 percent. |
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5. |
David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, hoped to match a reduction in tax
revenue with a cutback in federal expenditures and proposed substantial cuts in
Social Security and Medicare. |
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6. |
But Congress, and even the president himself, rejected his idea; they were not
willing to antagonize middle-class and elderly voters who viewed these
government entitlements as sacred. |
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7. |
Social Security and Medicare, next to defense spending, were by far the
nation’s largest budget items; reductions in other programs would not achieve
the savings the administration desired. This contradiction between New Right
Republican ideology and political reality would continue to frustrate the party
into the twenty-first century. |
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8. |
As spending cuts fell short, the federal budget deficit increased dramatically.
Military spending contributed a large share of the growing federal debt. Reagan
and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger pushed through Congress a five-year,
$1.2 trillion military spending program. |
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9. |
By the time Reagan left office, the total federal debt had tripled, rising from
$930 billion in 1981 to $2.8 trillion in 1989. The rising annual deficits of
the 1980s contradicted Reagan’s pledge of fiscal conservatism. |
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10. |
Deregulation of prices in the trucking, airline, and railroad industries had begun
under President Carter in the late 1970s, but Reagan expanded the mandate to
include cutting back on government protections of consumers, workers, and the
environment. To reduce the reach of federal regulatory agencies, the Reagan
administration cut their budgets by an average of 12 percent. |
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11. |
Having attained two of his prime goals—a major tax cut and a dramatic increase
in defense spending—Reagan did not seriously attempt to scale back big
government and the welfare state. When he left office in 1989, federal spending
stood at 22.1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)
and federal taxes at 19 percent of
GDP,
both virtually the same as in 1981. In the meantime, though, the federal debt
had tripled in size, and the number of government workers had increased from
2.9 to 3.1 million. |
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12. |
Historians continue to debate whether there was a “Reagan Revolution.” Even if
he did not achieve everything many of his supporters desired, however, Reagan
left an indelible imprint on politics, public policy, and American culture. |
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13. |
During his two terms, Reagan appointed 368 federal court judges—most of them
with conservative credentials—and three Supreme Court justices: Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy.
Ironically, the latter two turned out to be far less devoted to New Right
conservatism than Reagan and his supporters imagined. Reagan also elevated
Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative Nixon appointee, to the position of
chief justice. Under Rehnquist’s leadership (1986–2005), the Court’s
conservatives took an activist stance, limiting the reach of federal laws,
ending court-ordered busing, and endorsing constitutional protection of
property rights. |
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14. |
On controversial issues such as individual liberties, abortion rights,
affirmative action, and the rights of criminal defendants, the presence of
O’Connor enabled the Court to resist the rightward drift and to maintain a
moderate position. As a result, the justices scaled back, but did not usually
overturn, the liberal rulings of the Warren and Burger Courts. |
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15. |
Another conservative legacy was the slow national response to one of the worst
disease epidemics of the postwar decades: HIV and AIDS. In 1981, American physicians identified HIV as
a new virus—one that was causing the deaths of hundreds of gay men, who were
prominent among the earliest carriers of the disease. |
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16. |
Within the
United States,
AIDS took nearly a hundred thousand lives in the 1980s—more than were lost in
the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined. However, because its most prominent early victims were gay men, President Reagan, emboldened by New
Right conservatives, hesitated in declaring a national health emergency. |
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17. |
Between 1981 and 1986, as the epidemic spread, the administration took little
action and prevented the surgeon general from speaking forthrightly to the
nation about the disease. In Reagan’s last years in office the administration
finally began to devote federal resources to treatment for HIV and AIDS
patients and research into possible vaccines. But the delay had proved costly,
inhumane, and embarrassing. |
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C. |
Morning in
America |
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|
1. |
Reagan’s tax cuts had barely taken effect when he was forced to reverse course.
High interest rates set by the Federal Reserve Board had cut the runaway
inflation of the Carter years, but sent the economy into a recession in 1981–1982
that put 10 million Americans out of work and shuttered 17,000 businesses.
Unemployment neared 10 percent, the highest rate since the Great Depression. |
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2. |
Reagan was forced to negotiate a tax increase with Congress in 1982—to the loud complaints of supply-side diehards. The
president’s job rating plummeted, and in the 1982 midterm elections Democrats
picked up twenty-six seats in the House of Representatives and seven state
governorships. |
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3. |
Fortunately for Reagan, the economy had recovered by 1983, restoring the
president’s job approval rating just in time for the 1984 presidential
election. During the campaign, Reagan emphasized the economic resurgence,
touring the country promoting his tax policies and the nation’s new prosperity. |
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4. |
The Democrats nominated former vice president Walter Mondale of
Minnesota. Reagan won a
landslide victory, losing only
Minnesota and
the
District of Columbia.
Still, Democrats retained their majority in the House and, in 1986, regained
control of the Senate. |
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5. |
By 1985, for the first time since 1915, the
United States
registered a negative
balance of international payments. It now imported more goods and capital than
it exported. The country became a debtor (rather than a creditor) nation. |
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6. |
The rapid ascent of the Japanese economy to become the world’s second largest
was a key factor in this historic reversal. |
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7. |
Meanwhile, American businesses grappled with a worrisome decline in
productivity. Because managers wanted to cut costs, the wages of most employees
stagnated. Further, because of foreign competition, the number of high-paying,
union-protected manufacturing jobs shrank. |
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8. |
By 1985, more people in the
United
States
worked for McDonald’s slinging Big
Macs than rolled out rails, girders, and sheet steel in the nation’s steel
industry. Middle-class Americans also found themselves with less economic
security as corporations reduced the number, pay, and pensions of middle-level
managers and accountants. |
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9. |
A brief return to competitiveness in the second half of the 1980s masked the
steady long-term transformation of the economy that had begun in the 1970s. The
nation’s heavy industries—steel, autos, and chemicals—continued to lose market
share to global competitors. |
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10. |
Increasingly, financial services, medical services, computer technology—service industries broadly speaking—were
the leading sectors of growth. This shift in the underlying foundation of the
American economy, from manufacturing to service, from making things to producing services, would have long-term consequences for the global
competitiveness of
U.S.
industries and the value of the dollar. |
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11. |
The economic growth of the second half of the 1980s popularized the
materialistic values championed by the free marketeers.
In the 1980s, Americans celebrated wealth accumulation in ways unseen since the
1920s. |
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12. |
Scientists had devised the first computers for military purposes during World
War II. Cold War military research subsequently funded the construction of
large mainframe computers, but they were too bulky for personal use. Between
the 1950s and the 1970s, concluding with the development of the microprocessor
in 1971, each generation of computers grew faster and smaller. |
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13. |
Apple Computers, founded in 1976, began producing small, individual computers
that could be easily used by a single person. When Apple enjoyed success, other
companies scrambled to get into the market. International Business Machines (
IBM) offered its first personal computer in 1981,
but Apple Corporation’s 1984 Macintosh computer (later shortened to Mac) became
the first run-away commercial success for a personal computer. |
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14. |
In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the Microsoft Corporation, whose MS-DOS and Windows operating systems soon dominated
the software industry. |
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15. |
In three decades, the computer had moved from a few
military research centers to thousands of corporate offices and then to
millions of peoples’ homes. In an age that celebrated free-market capitalism,
government research and government funding had played an enormous role in the
development of the most important technology since television. |
| III. The End of the Cold War |
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A. |
U.S.-Soviet Relations in a New Era |
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|
1. |
When Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, he broke with his immediate
predecessors in Cold War strategy. Nixon
regarded himself as a “realist” in foreign affairs, which meant advancing the
national interest without regard to ideology. His policy of détente with the Soviet Union and
China
embodied this realist view. Carter endorsed détente and continued to push for
relaxing Cold War tensions. This worked for a time, but the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan empowered hard-liners in the U.S. Congress and forced Carter to
take a tougher line—which he did with the Olympic boycott and grain embargo. |
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|
2. |
Conservatives did not believe in détente. Neither did they believe in the
containment policy that had guided U.S. Cold War strategy since 1947. Reagan
and his advisors wanted to defeat the
Soviet Union. His administration pursued a
two-pronged strategy toward that end. First, it abandoned détente and set about
rearming
America. |
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|
3. |
This buildup in American military strength, reasoned Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger, would force the Soviets into an arms race that would strain
their economy and cause domestic unrest. Second, the president supported
CIA initiatives to roll back Soviet influence in
the developing world by funding anticommunist movements in
Angola,
Mozambique,
Afghanistan, and
Central America. As a result, Reagan supported
repressive, right-wing regimes, particularly in
Guatemala,
Nicaragua, and
El Salvador. |
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4. |
In
Guatemala,
this approach produced a brutal military rule—thousands of opponents of the
government were executed or kidnapped. In
Nicaragua, Reagan actively
encouraged a coup against the left-wing Sandinista government, which had
overthrown the U.S.-backed strongman, Anastasio Somoza. And in
El Salvador,
the U.S.-backed government maintained secret “death-squads,” which murdered
members of the opposition. In each case, Reagan blocked Soviet influence, but
the damage done to local communities and to the international reputation of the
United States, as in
Vietnam,
was great. |
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5. |
For years, Reagan had denounced
Iran
as an “outlaw state” and a supporter of terrorism. But in 1985, he wanted its
help. To win
Iran’s
assistance in freeing two dozen American hostages, the administration sold arms
to the
Iran
without public or congressional knowledge. While this secret arms deal was
diplomatically and politically controversial, the use of resulting profits in
Nicaragua
was explicitly illegal. |
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6. |
To overthrow the democratically elected Sandinistas, which the president
accused of threatening
U.S.
business interests, Reagan ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assist an armed opposition group called the
Contras. |
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7. |
Although Reagan praised the Contras as “freedom fighters,” Congress worried
that the president and other executive branch agencies were assuming war-making
powers that the Constitution reserved to the legislature. In 1984, Congress
banned the
CIA and any other
government agency from providing any military support to the Contras. |
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8. |
Oliver North, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines and an aide to the
National Security Council, defied that ban. With the tacit or explicit consent
of high-ranking administration officials, including the president, North used
the profits from the Iranian arms deal to assist the Contras. |
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9. |
Still swayed by Reagan’s charm, the public accepted his convenient loss of
memory. Nonetheless, the Iran-Contra affair resulted in the prosecution of
Colonel North and several other officials and jeopardized the president’s
reputation. |
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10. |
The Soviet system of state socialism and central economic planning had
transformed
Russia
from an agricultural to an industrial society between 1917 and the 1950s. But
it had done so inefficiently. Most enterprises hoarded raw materials, employed
too many workers, and did not develop new products. The Russian economy fell farther
and farther behind those of capitalist societies, and most people in the Soviet
bloc endured a low standard of living. |
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11. |
Mikhail Gorbachev, a younger Russian leader, recognized the need for internal
economic reform and an end to the war in
Afghanistan. He introduced policies
of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring), which
encouraged widespread criticism of the rigid institutions and authoritarian
controls of the Communist regime. |
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|
12. |
To lessen tensions with the
United States,
Gorbachev met with Reagan in and by 1987, they had
agreed to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles based in
Europe. A year later, Gorbachev ordered Soviet troops out
of
Afghanistan,
and Reagan replaced many of his hard-line advisors with policymakers who
favored a renewal of détente. |
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|
13. |
As Gorbachev’s efforts revealed the flaws of the Soviet system, the peoples of Eastern
and
Central Europe demanded the ouster of
their Communist governments. In
Poland,
the Roman Catholic Church and its pope—Polish-born John Paul II—joined with
Solidarity, the trade union movement, to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime.
Soviet troops did not intervene, and a series of peaceful uprisings created a
new political order throughout the region. The destruction of the Berlin Wall
in 1989 symbolized the end of Communist rule in
Central
Europe. |
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14. |
Soviet military leaders seized power in August 1991 and arrested Gorbachev. But
widespread popular opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, the president of the
Russian
Republic, thwarted their efforts to oust
Gorbachev from office. This failure broke the dominance of the Communist Party. |
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15. |
On
December 25, 1991,
the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
formally dissolved to make way for an eleven-member
Commonwealth of
Independent
States (CIS). The
Russian
Republic assumed leadership of the CIS, but the
Soviet Union was no more. The collapse of the
Soviet Union was the result of internal weaknesses of the
Communist economy. External pressure from the
United States
played an important, though
secondary, role. |
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B. |
A New Political Order at Home and Abroad |
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|
1. |
Determined not to divide the country, Reagan did not actively push
controversial policies espoused by the Religious Right. While Reagan failed to
roll back the social welfare and regulatory state of the New Deal–Great Society
era, he changed the dynamic of American politics. His antigovernment rhetoric
won many adherents, as did his bold and fiscally dangerous tax cuts. |
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|
2. |
George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president and successor, was not beloved by conservatives.but he possessed an insider’s familiarity
with government and a long list of powerful allies, accumulated over three
decades of public service. |
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|
3. |
Bush’s route to the
White House reflected the post-Reagan alignments in American politics. In the
primaries, he faced a spirited challenge from Pat Robertson, the
archconservative televangelist. |
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|
4. |
On the Democratic
side, Jesse Jackson became the first African American to challenge for a
major-party nomination, winning eleven states in primary and caucus voting.
However, the much less charismatic
Massachusetts
governor, Michael Dukakis, emerged as the Democratic nominee. Bush won with 53
percent of the vote, a larger margin of victory than Reagan’s in 1980. |
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|
5. |
The end of the Cold War left the United States as the only military superpower
and raised the prospect of a “new world order” dominated by the United States
and its European and Asian allies. But American officials and diplomats now
confronted an array of regional, religious, and ethnic conflicts that defied
easy solutions. |
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|
6. |
None were more pressing or more complex than those in the
Middle
East. Middle Eastern conflicts would dominate the foreign policy
of the
United States
for the next two decades, replacing the Cold War at the center of American
geopolitics. |
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|
7. |
After Carter’s 1979 Egypt-Israel treaty at
Camp David,
there were few bright spots in U.S.-Middle Eastern diplomacy. In 1982, the
Reagan administration supported
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, a military operation intended to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). When Lebanese militants, angered at
U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel, killed 241 American marines, Reagan abruptly withdrew the forces. Three years later, Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and along the West Bank of the Jordan River—territories occupied by Israel since 1967—mounted an intifada, a civilian uprising against Israeli authority. In response, American diplomats stepped up their efforts to persuade the PLO and Arab nations to accept the legitimacy of Israel and to convince the Israelis to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Neither initiative met with much success. |
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|
8. |
American
interest in a reliable supply of oil from the region led the
United States
into a short but consequential war
in the
Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. In August 1990,
Iraq
went to war to expand its boundaries and oil supply. Iraqi troops quickly
conquered the small oil-rich neighbor of
Kuwait,
and threatened
Saudi Arabia,
the site of one-fifth of the world’s known oil reserves and an informal ally of
the
United States. |
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|
9. |
To preserve Western access to oil, President Bush sponsored a series of
resolutions in the United Nations Security Council calling for Iraqi withdrawal
from
Kuwait
.
Bush then successfully prodded the UN to authorize the use of force, and the
president organized a military coalition of thirty-four nations. |
| |
|
10. |
Dividing mostly along party lines, the Republican-led House of Representatives
authorized American participation by a vote of 252 to 182, and the
Democratic-led Senate agreed by the close margin of 52 to 47. |
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|
11. |
The coalition forces led by the
United States
quickly won the war for the “liberation of
Kuwait.” Bush wisely decided
against occupying
Iraq
and
removing Saddam Hussein from power and instead, he won passage of UN Resolution
687, which imposed economic sanctions against
Iraq. |
| |
|
12. |
The military victory, low incidence of American casualties, and quick
withdrawal produced a euphoric reaction at home. But Saddam Hussein remained a
formidable power in the region. His alleged ambitions were one factor that, in
March 2003, would cause Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, to initiate
another war in Iraq—one that would be much more protracted, expensive, and
bloody for Americans and Iraqis alike. |
| |
|
13. |
The post–Cold War world promised to be a multipolar one, with great
centers of power in Europe, the
United States,
and East Asia, and seemingly intractable conflict in the
Middle
East. |