Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog

This is the first of a four-part series on U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century, the focus of which will be to explain how America went from being the self-proclaimed “indispensable” leader of the free world in the 1990s to today’s more conflicted, hesitant, and introspective great power.  

America entered 2025 somewhat bruised and battered on the international stage after a tumultuous quarter century of foreign challenges, notable successes, tragic failures, and, most recently, policy flip-flops. This auspicious point in time offers, therefore, an appropriate juncture from which to look back and analyze how, on the international stage, we transitioned from the relatively heady days of American dominance in the 1990s to our current, more nuanced and discomfiting reality. To discern the causes of the latter, it behooves us to start this review by returning to the administration of President Bill Clinton.

The 1990s were a time of immense optimism and opportunity on the global stage for the United States — a “hyperpower” in the words of then French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, fresh off of victory in the Cold War after forty years of tense brinkmanship with the communist menace to the east. The Clinton administration pursued a mostly activist foreign policy, particularly in Europe where the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union intended to anchor the newly independent states of Central Europe into the western fold, ostensibly ensuring the security of those historically troubled lands from the geopolitical shock waves of Russia’s painful hangover from communism.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State during his second term — 1997-2001 — served as a champion for NATO expansion, welcoming her country of birth, the Czech Republic as well as Poland and Hungary into the alliance in 1999.  Of equal import, the United States led western efforts during the decade to thwart Serbia’s aggression and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in separate conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. 

While these U.S. policy initiatives were touted as successfully extending western paradigms of democracy and free market economics to nations previously caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, an incipient nationalistic leadership in the Kremlin saw the developments as a growing threat to Russia’s traditional interests. By the end of the 1990s, a little known, former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, had ascended to the pinnacle of power in Moscow, in the process vowing to return his beleaguered nation to the great power status he believed it deserved. Over the next twenty-five years, he would pursue that goal with supercilious determination.

Early in the Clinton administration, the young president inherited a humanitarian deployment of U.S. forces in the horn of East Africa, in the troubled nation of Somalia.  Due to a series of poor decisions, American troops became involved in a civil war in a country the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would derisively refer to with a schoolyard vulgarity. The result was Black Hawk Down, followed by a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia. More critically, the experience dampened the appetite of the Clinton White House to take on future humanitarian missions, leading the to its lamentable inaction during the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Our seeming indifference to that tragedy served as a turning point for the perception of the United States by much of the Global South, an inflection point on which China has since capitalized. 

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the 1990s saw intensive U.S. engagement with the Israelis and Palestinians to forge a lasting peace based on a two state solution. President Clinton expended an enormous amount of energy and political capital on the process, highlighted by the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Wye River Memorandum of 1998, and the Camp David negotiations of 2000. Despite bringing the two parties to the precipice of peace on several occasions, the efforts ultimately failed, the consequences of which continue to negatively affect U.S. interests in the region to this day. 

Saddam Hussein and Iraq remained an additional strategic challenge to U.S.prominence in the region during the Clinton years. In her  autobiography, Madam Secretary, former Secretary of State Albright detailed the Clinton foreign policy team’s intense focus on finding the right balance of diplomatic carrot and military stick to drive the truculent Iraqi dictator from power. Ultimately, this particular geopolitical can was kicked down the road to the incoming Bush administration, who would eventually take a decidedly more forceful approach to the Mesopotamian provocateur. 

Staying with the theme of “it’s your problem now,” during the transition to the new leadership team in late 2000, the Clinton White House repeatedly warned their successors of the escalating threat posed to the homeland by Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda (the base) terrorist franchise.  Having been stung by attacks on two U.S. Embassies in Africa in August of 1998 and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, Yemen in October of 2000, the Clinton administration was acutely aware of Al Qaeda’s lethality, tenacity, and nihilistic anti-Americanism. 

The fledgling Bush regime would tragically downplay the outgoing government’s warnings, only to see the trajectory of U.S. history abruptly altered on a clear September morning a mere eight months after taking office.

Note: This article was published by both the Brattleboro Reformer (13 June) and the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript (12 June).