History of the United States (1988-present)

At the dawn of the 1990s, it was becoming clear that the Cold War between the Communist Soviet bloc and the capitalist democracies of the U.S. and its allies was nearing an end. Revolutions had occurred in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other formerly Soviet states; the Berlin Wall had been dismantled, and the reunification of Germany was underway; and it seemed the fall of the Soviet Union's government was imminent. In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990, President George Bush declared 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." The exact nature of this new world order was somewhat vague, and it was not entirely clear what role the United States would play in it; but Bush's speech also acknowledged that the first major test of the new era had just surfaced.

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The Persian Gulf War

For details see the main article Persian Gulf War.

The nation of Iraq had been left bankrupt by the Iran-Iraq War, which Iraqi President Saddam Hussein felt had positioned Iraq as a bulwark against the expansion of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed in the war, Iraq needed money. Although Iraq had borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran, no country would lend it money except the United States, which left Saddam's regime a virtual client state of the US.

Saddam felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states and even the United States and argued that all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Iraq by slant drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait.

In 1990 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 Hussein in an emergency meeting, where Hussein 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.

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. Indeed, for reasons other than Saddam's late invasion of Kuwait, Iraq's stances in the international community had alarmed Western powers. Iraq was the leading country in forming the Arab League similar to the European Economic Community, an alliance of European countries. The intent of the League was that all oil-producing Arab nations would share and work together and plan their own army that would exclude Europeans. 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, remember the very destabilizing effects of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.

Saddam, shocked and apparently misled, ignored the deadline, and the Security Concil declared war on Iraq. The war commenced in January 1991, with U.S. troops forming the majority of Operation Desert Storm, joined by 33 other countries including Canada and Saudi Arabia. By the time Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait in late February, Iraq had lost an estimated 20,000 troops. Other sources speak of more than 100,000 on Iraqi side.

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1992 presidential election

For details see the main article U.S. presidential election, 1992.

Riding high on the success of the Gulf War, Bush enjoyed very high approval ratings for his job as president. However, economic problems dogged Bush, and with the entry of H. Ross Perot into the race, Bush found himself losing a three-way race between himself, independent candidate Perot, and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. See U.S. presidential election, 1992 for more.

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The Clinton administration

Bill Clinton entered office with high expectations from many Americans as a young president, the first of the Baby Boom generation to reach the White House, who had promised to focus on and resolve some of the United States' many domestic issues. Almost immediately, however, he was dogged by controversies over the personal backgrounds of some of his appointees, and by political clashes stemming from his announcement that he would permit homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. military.

These events in 1993 seemed to set the pattern for a man who would become one of the United States' more divisive Presidents, regarded with great affection by some constituencies, and anything but by others. His 1994 proposal of a national health care system for all Americans, championed by his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, ignited a political firestorm on the right, where it was vigorously opposed on the general principle that government was incompetent and should be shrunk, not expanded. The proposed system did not survive the debate.

Year by year, polarization grew in Washington, D.C., between the President and his adversaries on the right, the Republicans who assumed the majority in the House of Representatives in January 1995 and elected the ideology-driven Newt Gingrich their Speaker. Talk-show commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan and other politicized media outlets amplified the ever-louder quarrels, causing some to speak of a new "Culture War" in U.S. politics. The more extreme right-wing voices, who verged into uncompromising hostility toward the government, were somewhat discredited, however, after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995.

Clinton's terms in office will be remembered in some quarters as a "holiday from history" because of the nation's largely domestic focus during the period. Very large numbers of Americans were mostly ignoring politics in favor of business and personal affairs. The years 1994-2000 witnessed the emergence of a technology-driven "new economy", solid increases in real output, low inflation rates, and a drop in unemployment to below 5%. The Internet and related technologies made their first broad penetrations into the economy at large, prompting a Wall Street technology-stock bubble, which Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan described as "irrational exuberance".

Few seemed to be nervous about events abroad; after the demise of the Soviet Union the United States was militarily dominant, and Japan, sometimes seen as the largest economic rival to the U.S., was caught in a period of stagnation. China was emerging as a foremost trading partner in more and more fields. Localized conflicts such as those in Haiti and the Balkans prompted President Clinton to send in U.S. troops as peacekeepers, which did generate controversy about whether policing the rest of the world was a proper U.S. role. Islamic radicals overseas loudly threatened assaults against the "infidel" U.S. for its ongoing military presence in the Middle East, and even staged the first World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, as well as a number of deadly attacks on Americans abroad.

The foreign issue with the most impact on Americans at home was immigration, most of it from Latin America and Asia, which swelled during the 1990s, laying the groundwork for great changes in the demographic makeup of the U.S. population in coming decades.

Along with strong backing from traditional Democrats and liberals, Clinton was also supported by many moderates who appreciated his centrist "New Democrat" policies, which steered away from the more excessive aspects of the 1960s Great Society. For example, welfare reform legislation that he signed into law in 1996 requires welfare recipients to work as a condition of benefits and imposes limits on how long individuals may receive payments. Clinton also pursued tough federal anti-crime and anti-drug policies and called for the hiring of 100,000 new police officers.

Clinton was reelected in 1996, defeating Republican Senator Bob Dole and a weakened and marginal re-run by H. Ross Perot.

Most voters in 1992 and 1996 had been willing to overlook long-standing rumors of extramarital affairs by Clinton, deeming them irrelevant. These matters came to a head, however, in February 1998 when reports surfaced of ongoing sexual relations between Clinton and a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton initially and vigrously denied the relationship, but was forced to retract that assertion in August after the Lewinsky matter came under investigation by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who had been looking into various allegations of past misdeeds by Clinton for several years. Since Clinton's denials had extended to a deposition before Starr's office, impeachment proceedings began in the House against the President on charges of perjury.

Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives, but not convicted at his trial by the U.S. Senate, and a scandal-weary and embarrassed U.S. public seemed largely satisfied to have the matter closed.

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The George W. Bush administration

Though his election had been the focus of intense controversy, George W. Bush was sworn in as President on January 20, 2001 after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the electoral legal issues in his favor. The first eight months of his term in office were relatively uneventful; however, it had become clear by that time that the economic boom of the 1990s was at an end. The year 2001 witnessed the end of the boom psychology and performance, with output increasing only 0.3% and unemployment and business failures rising substantially. President Bush approved a large federal tax cut with the intent of revitalizing the economy.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four airliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, destroying both towers and taking just under 3000 lives. (The fourth plane crashed in southern Pennsylvania, evidently after some of the passengers stormed the cockpit). The immense shock, grief and anger brought on by the attacks profoundly altered the national mood; President Bush delcared that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network were the culprits and announced a war on terror.

The war on terror took two fronts. At home, Congress approved several measures to protect against future attacks, including creating the Department of Homeland Security and passing the USA PATRIOT Act, which most civil rights groups have criticized. The immediate military response was an invasion of Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban government which supported and sheltered them. The U.S. was joined by a coalition which included forces from more than a dozen countries, and was successful in removing the Taliban from power, although fighting continues between the coalition and Afghans of various factions.

The response to the terrorist attacks showed the remarkable resilience of the economy. In 2002, the GDP growth rate rose to 2.8%. A major short-term problem in the first half of 2002 was a sharp decline in the stock market, fueled in part by the exposure of dubious accounting practices in some major corporations. Another economic problem that continues to the present time is unemployment, which has experienced the longest period of monthly increase since the Great Depression. The robustness of the market, combined with the unemployment rate, led economists to refer to the situation as a "jobless recovery."

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War in Iraq

In his State of the Union address in January 2002, President Bush called Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil," accusing them of supporting terrorism and seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As the year went on, it became clear that the Bush administration was planning on an invasion of Iraq, on the grounds that Saddam Hussein supported terrorism and possessed biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

Many longtime allies of the U.S., including France, Germany, and Canada, as well as millions of people within the U.S. and around the world, did not believe that the evidence for the President's accusations were well-founded enough to justify a full-scale invasion, especially as military personnel were still needed in Afghanistan. The United Nations Security Council did not approve of the invasion, and the U.S. therefore provided most of the forces in the Invasion of Iraq. With the support of a coalition whose major partners included the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy, Iraq was invaded on March 20, 2003.

After six weeks of combat between the coalition and the Iraqi army, the invading forces had secured control of many key regions; Saddam had fled his palace, his regime clearly over; and on May 1, Bush declared, under a sign reading "mission accomplished," that major ground operations were at an end.

Nevertheless, the fighting continued. At first, it was not clear whether most the resistors were al-Qaida sympathizers or former members of Saddam's military who remained loyal to him, or whether the invasion had ignited anti-Americanism and inspired movements opposed to being occupied by an invading force. It now appears that most of the resistance is from this latter group. Saddam was captured in December 2003 and taken into custody.

With casualties increasing, and the cost of the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq estimated at over $200 billion, the war has lost about one-third of its supporters in the U.S. since the end of major operations was announced. Recent polls suggest that international displeasure with the United States is at an all-time high, with a majority of people in Europe believing that the country is too powerful and acts mainly in self-interest, and a vast majority in predominantly Muslim nations believing that the United States is arrogant, belligerent, or hateful to Islam.

History of the United States: Timeline & Topics

Pre-Colonial | Colonial | 1776–1789 | 1789–1849 | 1849–1865 | 1865–1918 | 1918–1945 | 1945–1964 | 1964–1980 | 1980–1988 | 1988–present
Military | Postal | Diplomatic | Imperialist | Religious | Industrial


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