For Gen Xers like myself who are used to ironic detachment, there is an oddity about my age cohort’s formative policy experiences. They all happened in the time between the late 1980s and late 1990s, which was an idyllic decade for American foreign policy.

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Consider the state of the world when that decade started. A wave of democratization that had begun in Southern Europe had spread to Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact had disintegrated, peacefully. Nelson Mandela had been freed in South Africa and apartheid rule was clearly going to end. Just as these countries were embracing democracy, they were also pivoting toward more open economies. The underlying trends seemed awfully darn favorable to the United States.

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U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s proceeded on two tracks. The first consisted of efforts to lock in and expand the set of Cold War institutions erected by the West. The World Trade Organization was being negotiated into existence. Membership in bodies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank expanded to include countries that had avoided them because of outdated ideologies. “Containment” was replaced as a grand strategy by “reintegration.”

The second track was to focus aspects of U.S. hard power on the more resistant parts of the globe. The United States built a broad-based multilateral coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. To be sure, the U.N. intervention in Somalia did not work out, nor did the nonintervention in Rwanda. U.S.-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo seemed messy at first but successful in the main, however. Those interventions were quick enough to avoid the quagmire label. Similarly, the United States stepped up to coordinate global responses to the Mexican peso crisis and Asian financial crisis

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So, to sum up, the world seemed to be trending in America’s direction, and U.S. active interventions to change the world seemed be yielding results.

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Of course, what seemed like victories at the time created problems that would surface in the 21st century. One could argue that the U.S. intervention in Kosovo, far more than NATO expansion, was the start of worsening relations with Russia. The Asian financial crisis convinced Pacific Rim economies to start self-insuring against a financial crisis so they would never have to go to the IMF again. This triggered the start of macroeconomic imbalances that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

More importantly, the successful military interventions of the 1990s contributed to the forever wars of the 2000s. The kinetic phases of those interventions were quick enough to convince policymakers and pundits that military interventions could be fast, furious and finite. Afghanistan and Iraq have played out quite differently.

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Even more importantly, the perception that the arc of history was bending in all the best ways proved to be unfounded. As Jacob Levy noted recently in Vox, there is no arc of history, not really: “There is moral improvement over some time spans, in some places: the fall of Jim Crow or of communism in Eastern Europe. But those aren’t the verdict of history or the historical revelation of moral truth, any more than the return of measles or of neo-Nazis represents the verdict of history.”