1979 was a bad year for U.S. foreign policy. At home, the country was being battered by stagflation and high oil prices, developments that raised fundamental questions about the economic underpinnings of American power. Abroad, the United States was suffering a seemingly unending train of setbacks and humiliations. From the overthrow of longtime allies in Iran and Nicaragua, to the seizing of U.S. hostages in Tehran, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the final collapse of détente, signs of American impotence and geopolitical decay abounded. Malaise was the watchword in foreign and domestic affairs alike; all around the world, it seemed, the United States no longer controlled events but was at their mercy. “The principal developments of 1979 registered the continued decline in the nation’s international position,” wrote one observer in Foreign Affairs. “The impact of the events which have brought this decade to a close has been such as to make the fact of America’s decline very nearly a commonplace.”1
This perception of American decline was not simply a product of what had happened in 1979, but of what had happened in the entire decade before that. In many ways, the 1970s had seemed to represent the final passing of the international predominance that Washington had wielded after World War II. In the wake of that conflict, the United States had used its unmatched power to erect a postwar order that carried the distinctive mark of American supremacy. By the 1970s, however, that postwar order—and the supremacy on which it rested—were coming under serious doubt.
The Cold War was frequently feared to be tilting in Moscow’s direction, amid a major Soviet military buildup and a string of Kremlin advances—and American defeats—in the Third World. U.S. economic hegemony looked equally imperiled, due to fierce competition from Western Europe and Japan, and the massive vulnerabilities exposed by the oil shocks. Across the developing regions, an increasingly restive global south seemed to be in revolt against U.S. authority. And throughout the decade, from the collapse of Bretton Woods to the fall of Saigon and beyond, the United States had been buffeted by crises that ruthlessly revealed its weaknesses and suggested that its global influence was receding. Against this backdrop, it was hardly surprising that so many informed observers doubted U.S. staying power. During the mid-1970s, no less a figure than Henry Kissinger often deplored the erosion of America’s position and the “paralysis” of its diplomacy.2 By the end of the decade, the warnings were starker still. “The retreat of American power” could “become a rout,” former Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger wrote in 1979. “The trend could well become irreversible in many respects.”3 The American century, Schlesinger and like-minded commentators worried, might be dying a premature death.
As we now know, of course, such predictions turned out to be inaccurate. The United States was not destined to see its global leadership slip inescapably away. On the contrary, by the early 1990s the country was enjoying an international supremacy so pronounced that it required an entirely new nomenclature: unipolarity.4 The world had become indisputably unipolar in a geopolitical and military sense, with the Cold War ending on U.S. and Western terms, the opposing Eastern bloc disintegrating, and America’s longtime global rival—the Soviet Union—in the process of outright dissolution. No longer were international affairs defined by a bipolar standoff between hostile strategic heavyweights. The new order, rather, had America as the world’s sole superpower—the only international actor with truly global reach, and a country whose unmatched military, economic, and diplomatic capabilities gave it a vast margin of power and influence over any competitor. If anything, that influence was poised to expand even further with the Cold War’s end, and the events of recent years had generally underscored, rather than undermined, U.S. authority in world affairs. The United States, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote, was now “in a unique position, without experience, without precedent, and standing alone at the height of power.”5
The world had become unipolar in an ideological sense, as well. The values and practices that Washington preferred were experiencing an unprecedented global ascendancy, as democracy and free-market economics spread far and wide. These liberal institutions were flourishing in areas where they had been weak or even absent only years earlier, sweeping across much of the Third World and broad swaths of the former “Second World.” Competing ideological models, by contrast, seemed to be in wholesale retreat before this relentless advance. “The end of history” had arrived, one U.S. policymaker memorably declared: the triumph of economic and political liberalism was so complete as to bring mankind’s ideological evolution to a close.6 Hyperbole aside, the preeminence of the U.S.-backed liberal model was striking, and the international system as a whole now appeared to be remaking itself in America’s image and to America’s advantage. It was, altogether, a remarkable and even stunning turnaround. In just over a decade, the United States had gone from the apparent decline of the late 1970s to the reinvigorated and multidimensional primacy of the post–Cold War era. “Now is the unipolar moment,” conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1991; the core feature of global politics was U.S. dominance.7
In this book, I examine U.S. foreign policy from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, focusing on two fundamental questions about the arc of American power. First, how did the United States make this transition from malaise to renewed primacy in such a relatively modest amount of time? How, in other words, did a unipolar, post–Cold War order take form following the traumas and travails of the 1970s, and what role did U.S. policy play in forming it? Second, and more generally, what is the relationship between structure and strategy in shaping the global environment? To what extent are major changes in the international order driven by deep structural forces over which policymakers have little direct control, and to what extent are those changes driven by concrete strategy—the deliberate and coordinated use of national power to achieve major objectives—pursued by countries such as the United States? In essence, this book seeks to make sense of a crucial period of transformation and renewal in U.S. foreign policy; it also explores the broader issue of how American power affects, and is affected by, the larger global milieu.
To be clear at the outset, this book is not simply another study of the end of the Cold War, the subject that has heretofore dominated the scholarly literature on the period. The trajectory of the late Cold War does certainly play a central role in the story, and one that is informed by the new archival materials and secondary works that are continually enriching our understanding of that issue. This volume, however, opens the analytical aperture wider. It weaves the late superpower struggle into a broader story about the interplay of global change and U.S. policy in the making of the post–Cold War order, one that also gives prominence to subjects like international political economy, processes of democratization and political transformation in the developing world, and the rise of new global challenges such as terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. As I argue, these and other issues were all integral to crafting the contours of the unipolar order that emerged in the early 1990s. Taking this more holistic view is therefore indispensable to assembling the key pieces of the historical puzzle, and to grappling with the extraordinary changes under consideration here.
This more holistic approach is also what most distinguishes this book from the existing scholarship on the period. As the voluminous and fast-growing literature on the end of the Cold War indicates, historians and other analysts have begun to assess parts of U.S. foreign relations during the 1980s and the years immediately surrounding that decade.8 What has not yet been done, however, is to draw these various parts together, into the larger whole that is necessary to really make sense of the U.S. resurgence. The relaunching of American primacy from the late 1970s to the early 1990s was one of the most momentous global developments of the late twentieth century, and it can only be understood by examining international events and U.S. policy across a number of key dimensions. To the best of my knowledge, this book is the first to provide such a perspective.9
This book is further distinguished by the fact that it draws heavily on relevant archival material, much of which has only recently become available. Admittedly, the archival record on the years from the late 1970s to the early 1990s is not what it should be, and full declassification will not occur for some time. But the frontiers of declassification have progressed far enough that scholars can now use archival materials to study, in considerable detail, American policy on subjects from U.S.-Soviet relations to Persian Gulf security, and on episodes from the Jimmy Carter years through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. This book relies heavily on such documentation, gathered from presidential libraries and other U.S.-based collections and repositories. It also uses oral histories and interviews, the records of multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and a smaller number of foreign records relating to the policies of key countries with which U.S. officials interacted. Taken together, these records yield new insights on U.S. policy in a pivotal era, and they shed light on the relationship between volition and circumstance—between American strategy and broader global currents. By aggressively mining the emerging archival and primary-source record, this book offers a fuller picture of its subject than has heretofore been possible.10
At the same time, however, this book is necessarily limited and focused in what it seeks to achieve, and two disclaimers regarding scope and method may be useful here. First, this volume is not a full international history of world affairs during this period, but rather emphasizes how U.S. leaders perceived, responded to, and ultimately shaped global change. Telling this story, of course, requires appreciating the international environment in which American initiatives were situated and the policies of the countries with which U.S. officials dealt. Without such analysis, it is impossible really to grasp either the sources or impacts of U.S. behavior. Nonetheless, a complete global history of this period—one that examines in great detail the perspectives of all key nations and participants—is beyond the scope of this project, which remains essentially a study of American policy and strategy in a dynamic international context.
Second, although this book offers a broad perspective on American state-craft in the run-up to the unipolar moment, it is by no means a fully comprehensive account of U.S. policy. My approach here is meant to be more interpretive than encyclopedic—I focus less on covering all aspects of U.S. diplomacy than on emphasizing those aspects and themes that were most critical to the rise of the unipolar order. The result is an account that is necessarily somewhat selective in what it stresses and what it minimizes or ignores. But it is one that is thereby intended to keep the interpretation and argument relatively clean and clear, and to ensure that the analysis and evidence presented go straight to the heart of the story.11
To relate that story, I focus on three principal stages of U.S. renewal. First, I begin by reexamining the 1970s, a period when several deep structural trends were starting to rework the international landscape in America’s favor, even as short-term events made it appear decidedly otherwise. Second, I follow the story through the 1980s. This was the crucial decade when U.S. officials—particularly the Reagan administration—increasingly perceived these structural trends, and exploited them through forward-leaning policies that restored American momentum and accentuated the positive forces at work. Third, I conclude by analyzing the climactic period between 1989 and 1992, when George H. W. Bush and his advisers wrestled with the final crises of the bipolar era, while also taking advantage of those crises to forge a post–Cold War order based on U.S. primacy.12 Throughout this volume, my analysis is therefore on the way that underlying global shifts interacted with specific U.S. initiatives to foster far-reaching changes in the international system. Indeed, a core thesis is that the emergence of the unipolar era reflected a synergistic interaction between structure, on the one hand, and deliberate and proactive strategy, on the other.
I trace this process across six substantive chapters, organized according to the periodization and analytical approach just sketched. As I explain in chapter 1, the American renewal actually began in the 1970s, a decade whose history was far more paradoxical than it initially looked. The difficulties that Washington encountered during that decade were hardly imaginary, and they created pervasive anxiety about U.S. prospects. In doing so, however, they masked the emergence of three profound global trends that were beginning to shift the international environment to longer-term U.S. advantage. The Soviet Union was slipping into irreversible systemic decline, leaving it ill-suited for prolonged geopolitical competition and highly vulnerable to the Western counteroffensive that was gradually taking shape. Meanwhile, the onset of modern-day globalization was rejuvenating U.S. economic power, and setting the stage for the proliferation of free-market practices and ideas. Not least of all, the rise of a transnational human rights consciousness and third-wave democratization were starting to alter world politics in ways that would eventually prove quite beneficial to U.S. ideological proclivities and strategic interests. Amid the day-to-day crises of the 1970s, great historical forces were moving strongly in America’s direction, and laying the structural basis for a very different post–Cold War order.
To some extent, U.S. policymakers were even beginning to develop the approaches needed to make the most of those trends. The story of the 1970s was definitely not one of masterful strategy, and as chapter 1 makes clear, U.S. officials from Kissinger to Jimmy Carter often found themselves tossed about by challenges that were hard enough to comprehend, let alone control. What can be said for those officials—in the Gerald Ford and particularly the Carter administrations—is that they did progressively come to understand the more fundamental changes occurring in the world, and to start piecing together initiatives meant to adapt U.S. policy accordingly. The near-term record of those initiatives was not always impressive—Carter’s most significant efforts to promote human rights and democracy were catastrophic failures, for instance, and no administration could conquer global economic upheaval. But from the Cold War struggle, to the human rights and democratic revolutions, to the major issues of globalization and international economic relations, the initial components of more effective strategy were slowly, fitfully, and sometimes ironically coming into place. In this sense, the policymakers of the 1970s, although often frustrated in their own time, helped lay the foundations on which their successors would so fruitfully build.
In chapters 2–5, I take the story through the 1980s. This was the period when U.S. leaders truly began to harness the structural forces at work, so as to reassert national power and shape the international environment in highly advantageous ways. The Cold War, for example, was utterly transformed during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and in chapter 2 I contend that perceptive U.S. statecraft was a vital reason why. Even before taking office, Reagan had identified the weaknesses of the Soviet position and the possibilities for a concerted U.S. counterattack. During the early 1980s, his administration built on Carter-era programs to launch a multipronged campaign that pounced on those weaknesses and reclaimed the geopolitical high ground. From mid-decade onward, Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz then deftly intertwined pressure and diplomacy to elicit a dramatic easing of tensions on remarkably favorable terms. To be sure, U.S. policy toward Moscow was hardly seamless under Reagan, and his eventual successes were assisted enormously by factors such as the worsening crisis of the Soviet system and the innovative leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. But even so, the course of U.S.-Soviet relations showed that American strategy had become highly attuned to underlying international shifts, and that it was moving energetically to reap the rewards. The result was to help fundamentally alter the trajectory of the Cold War, and to advance that conflict markedly toward its triumphant conclusion.
The Cold War was not the only area in which structural opportunity evoked productive strategy during the 1980s. In chapter 3, I explore how U.S. policy capitalized upon another historic opening by empowering the democratic revolution. As early as the Carter years, American officials had argued that a more democratic, rights-conscious world would be one in which Washington was ideologically and geopolitically ascendant, and they had started more intensively (if not always effectively) to apply U.S. power in the service of liberalization abroad. Despite some significant early backtracking, the Reagan administration ultimately embraced the logic of democracy promotion with even greater fervor, and with far better results. Reagan, Shultz, and other officials pursued a strategy meant to seize upon and extend the moment of democratic opportunity. That strategy mixed long-term efforts to strengthen the building blocks of democracy, with nearer-term initiatives to bolster reformers and move authoritarian regimes toward political openings. Admittedly, the strategy was sometimes applied haltingly, and its implementation entailed unavoidable costs and compromises. But in case after case, from Latin America to East Asia and beyond, U.S. influence became a critical factor in assisting democratic breakthroughs, preventing authoritarian backsliding, and fostering a global climate in which American values and institutions were ever more preponderant. “History is on freedom’s side,” Shultz said; America had the initiative in the struggle to influence the world’s political future.13
It also had the initiative in the struggle to shape the global political economy, as I discuss in chapter 4. During the 1970s, major tectonic shifts had begun to create a more integrated world economy in which market principles were advancing and the United States was well situated to prosper. During the 1980s, U.S. strategy helped affirm those shifts and drive the neoliberal advance forward. The Reagan administration had always been committed to fostering a more open, market-oriented order, and over the course of the decade, that administration and the next one would develop the concrete policies and leverage needed to make it happen. After some first-term diffidence, Reagan and his second-term treasury secretary, James Baker, gradually built on the steps taken by their 1970s-era predecessors to renew international cooperation among the major developed countries and thereby smooth the frictions caused by globalization. The administration also managed a fraught relationship with Japan in ways that brought that country more deeply into the global financial system, and it catalyzed a new round of multilateral trade talks that would eventually deliver a far-reaching liberalization of world commerce.
If anything, the gains were more dramatic in the developing regions. Here, U.S. investment, technology, and policy figured centrally in the astonishing economic liberalization undertaken by China from the late 1970s onward. Moreover, in cooperation with the IMF and the World Bank, the Reagan and later the George H. W. Bush administrations used the Third World debt crisis as an aperture to encourage free-market reforms and push globalization into the global south. By the end of the 1980s, the neoliberal order was becoming more firmly entrenched from the First World to the Third, and the international economy was becoming progressively more reflective of U.S. interests. From geopolitics to geoeconomics, American statecraft was accelerating the pace of positive change, and moving the global system in a more unipolar direction.
This imposing record was a testament to the strategic acumen of U.S. officials, and especially to that shown by the Reagan administration across an array of surpassingly consequential international matters. Not everywhere were the trends working America’s way, however, and as I argue in chapter 5, events in one region offered an essential counterpoint to the favorable flow of world affairs and U.S. policy. In the greater Middle East, the late 1970s had seen the rise of three key countercurrents that generally cut against U.S. interests: chronic and growing instability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf, the emergence of often-radical forms of political Islam, and a surge in international terrorism emanating from the region. All these trends had deep roots in regional politics and society, all were simultaneously dramatized and invigorated by the Iranian revolution of 1979, and all posed severe difficulties for U.S. officials concerned with maintaining access and influence in a crucial area. Elsewhere, the United States could ride the wave of history; here, it was coming face to face with the intractable issues that would plague U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades.
In this more adverse climate, both the Carter and Reagan administrations struggled mightily to overcome the challenges they confronted. In some instances, as with the conflict against Middle Eastern terrorism, the problem simply proved resistant to the decisive application of U.S. power. In others, such as the struggle to stabilize the Gulf amid the Iran-Iraq War, progress on one front led to dilemmas and conflicts anew. Finally, in the case of Washington’s support for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, U.S. policies purchased short-term gains at the price of inflaming the underlying dangers. When the 1980s ended, then, lasting victories of the type won elsewhere in the world remained elusive, and Washington’s troubles in the Middle East were only escalating. As the unipolar era was gradually taking shape, then, so were some of the most persistent and perilous threats that would preoccupy U.S. officials in the years ahead.
These threats notwithstanding, by the late 1980s a mix of profound global trends and conscious U.S. policies had moved the world to the brink of an epochal shift in the international order. The consummation of that shift, which I examine in chapter 6, came between 1989 and 1992. During these years, the George H. W. Bush administration faced a series of epic strategic shocks that shattered the creaking Cold War structure and marked the transition to the post–Cold War era. And in each case, the administration responded in ways that established U.S. primacy as the foundation of the new global system. As the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled, Bush used U.S. influence to facilitate the reunification of Germany on terms that gutted the Warsaw Pact, and replaced a bifurcated European order with one in which Washington, its allies, and their values were clearly dominant. In responding to the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–1991, the administration showcased America’s unrivaled military and diplomatic muscle, and demonstrated that U.S. leadership would remain the essential guarantor of stability in the post-bipolar era. Finally, amid the decay and downfall of the Soviet Union, the Bush team laid the groundwork for a post–Cold War strategy aimed at preserving and exploiting U.S. primacy into the future. At a series of critical junctures in global politics, an administration that was often scored for lacking vision and purpose pursued policies that were both purposeful and visionary indeed.14
By the early 1990s, the United States had thus completed its impressive international revival, and the outlines of the unipolar order were coming plainly into view. American power had proven far more durable and resilient than so many observers had only fairly recently predicted; the crisis of U.S. primacy in the 1970s had been followed not by an inexorable decline into mediocrity but by the ascent to a new era of international preeminence. The key strategic questions that now confronted the United States were how long its unipolar moment would last, and how rewarding it would actually be.
Several interpretive themes run through this book; five are of primary importance. First, as noted previously, the post–Cold War unipolarity that the United States enjoyed was not defined solely by an abundance of material capabilities and the absence of a “peer competitor”—the metrics that international relations scholars generally use to characterize unipolar systems.15 Rather, American preeminence reflected a broader set of international arrangements and power dynamics. U.S. superiority in the military, economic, and strategic realms was reinforced by organic alliance and diplomatic relationships that enhanced America’s strength and extended its global influence. More important, that superiority was complemented by a soft-power ideological hegemony embodied in the breathtaking advance of free markets, free trade, and free political institutions. As discussed in the following chapters, Washington’s geopolitical triumph in the Cold War was intertwined with the increasing pervasiveness of its vision for how societies should be run and international interchange should be organized. The post– Cold War global imbalance in capabilities was thus equaled by the imbalance between the U.S.-supported liberal model and any of its rivals. The unipolar order was one in which the United States possessed multiple and mutually reinforcing dimensions of dominance, and it was this compound character that made America’s post–Cold War perch seem so formidable.
This first theme is closely related to a second, which has to do with the manner in which that order emerged in the first place. Contrary to what numerous authors have argued, the rise of the unipolar moment and America’s post–Cold War dominance was not a mere accident of history, or something that simply “happened” with the unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the Soviet collapse two years later.16 In reality, it was something that had much deeper, and broader, historical origins. This transformation traced back to a whole collection of deeply rooted international phenomena affecting issues ranging from superpower relations, to trends in the world’s political complexion, to the nature of the global economy. These were phenomena that began to unfold in earnest during the 1970s, that received an essential impetus from U.S. policy in the 1980s and after, and that thereby culminated in the astonishing historical rupture of the Bush era. In this sense, the global turn toward unipolarity was an episode that played out over a period of years, and it involved a broad range of issues, initiatives, and interventions that all interacted to produce the eventual outcome. The unipolar turn, in other words, was not a discrete event but rather a historical process, one that drew on long-term structural change as well as calculated U.S. strategy.
This second theme leads, in turn, to a third, which is that understanding the changes in the global environment during this period requires looking not solely to structure, on the one hand, or strategy, on the other, but to the symbiotic interaction between the two. Historians and other analysts have long argued the merits of “individual agency” versus “structural forces” interpretations of the past, a debate that has been vigorously renewed in recent scholarship on the end of the Cold War.17 What I argue in this book is that neither of these approaches is, by itself, adequate. The American resurgence would not have been possible without the tectonic shifts that commenced in the 1970s, which helped rejuvenate a sagging superpower and created tremendous opportunities for U.S. policymakers to exploit. Yet it is nearly inconceivable that events would have unfolded as they did had not U.S. policymakers so adroitly exploited those opportunities—by recognizing the trends in play and deploying American power to accentuate them, and by acting decisively at points of great fluidity in world affairs. The rise of the unipolar moment occurred at the nexus of impersonal historical forces and conscious policy choices; good strategy allowed the United States to make the most of its good fortune.
This statement holds true as a general proposition regarding the period under consideration in this book; it also pertains particularly to the two administrations that receive most extended treatment here. The Reagan and Bush administrations did not engender epochal global departures from scratch, and objective observers must recognize that both teams were exceptionally fortunate to wield power at a time when so much was breaking Washington’s way. But across a wide assortment of issues, both administrations proved highly adept at identifying the critical contingencies and conjunctures, and thereby leveraging U.S. influence to deliver outsized results. If a core task of strategy resides in determining the structural propensity of things and positioning one’s nation to profit, then American strategy in the Reagan and Bush years was historically potent and perceptive.18
This third theme, however, touches on a fourth, which is that the making of good strategy was itself a process, one that could be as iterative and messy as it was far-sighted and inspired. Strategy is too commonly thought of as a panacea that allows policymakers to transcend the challenges of the international environment, or as a roadmap that plots out all the twists and turns of policy in advance. But strategy is actually something quite different. Strategy is inherently iterative—it requires combining a long-range vision of where one wants to go with a degree of trial-and-error adaptation in devising the concrete policies that will get one there. Strategy is also inherently messy—it is an imperfect discipline in which missteps and trade-offs are unavoidable.19 American strategy during this period underscores these innate characteristics. It generally took time for U.S. policymakers to fully grasp the global trends that emerged during the 1970s, and to integrate those trends into long-range visions for national renewal. It often took even more time and effort, along with a substantial amount of learning and recalibration, to turn those visions into the effective policies that so improved the U.S. posture during the 1980s. Whether in U.S.-Soviet relations, democracy promotion, or efforts to spread market-oriented reforms, the road to success was bumpy and tortuous. In each case, American strategy would eventually get the country to the desired destination—but not without detours and course corrections along the way.
Even then, the legacy of U.S. strategy and resurgence was not without ambiguities; this is a fifth and final theme. On the whole, America’s international position improved greatly over the years covered in this book, and the record of U.S. policy could reasonably be called one of historic achievement. By the early 1990s, the United States had attained a level of international superiority and reach that empires past could only have dreamed of. From the early 1990s onward, Washington would then manage to sustain its unipolar status for longer than many international-relations experts had initially predicted, while also using its prerogatives to continue influencing global outcomes in unparalleled—and often very constructive—ways. By virtually any reasonable standard—and certainly compared to what so many informed observers had expected in the late 1970s—these outcomes were enviable indeed.
Yet we must avoid the triumphalism that can be so tempting in recounting this history, because there was a debit side of the ledger as well.20 The global forces unleashed in the 1970s were not uniformly beneficial for America, for they included challenges—such as Islamic radicalism and Middle Eastern terrorism—that would bedevil U.S. policymakers for decades. Nor were even the positive changes unalloyed in their effects. As we will see, the strategic successes of the 1980s frequently came at a cost, whether in moral, financial, or even geopolitical terms, and in some cases they helped foster the very problems that U.S. strategy would confront in the unipolar era. Similarly, phenomena such as globalization and neoliberalism would ultimately prove to be something of a double-edged sword. Not least of all, the U.S. determination to maintain the primacy it had won by the early 1990s had its own downsides. It would leave the country engaged in a costly and taxing global mission, while also courting the hubris that came with unrivaled strength—and the enmity of those whom U.S. power and policies seemed to threaten. For all the benefits it bestowed, the unipolar moment would therefore not be a time of peace or repose for America. It would simply introduce the country to a new set of dangers and problems.