The Presidency and Foreign Policy Post Cold War

For a decade or so after the Cold War, the idea of democracy spreading around the world seemed all but impossible.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991; the United States was now the world's sole remaining super power.  Our influence could easily be spread around the world.

That is not to say things were perfect.  As the Cold War was wrapping up; Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded its tiny neighbor Kuwait.  From August 1990 to January 1991 the United States tried everything that they could do to get Iraq out of Kuwait.  Hussein ignored ultimatums so President George HW Bush ordered air strikes over Iraq on January 16, 1991.  Interestingly this was the first time in the 20th Century that a war between the United States and a foreign nation had started under a Republican president.  As January turned into February, there were no signs of Iraqi retreat.  The President ordered ground troops on February 23, 1991.  Within 100 hours Iraq had retreated, but Saddam Hussein would remain in power.  He would be a thorn in American foreign policy for the next 15 years. 

Throughout the 1990s, the United States had a president of the United States born after the Second World War and raised in the shadows of the Cold War that had just ended 13 months before his Inauguration.  But the Clinton administration was not going to be easy when it came to foreign policy.  For one thing, he did not have the expertise on the subject like his predecessor, George HW Bush did.  If you remember, much of Bush 41's four years in office was focusing on the problems around the world and if re-elected in 1992; he would concentrate more on issues within the United States.  Bill Clinton had inherited foreign messes like Iraq and just before his administration started; Somalia.  A president accused during the 1992 Campaign of being a draft dodger and organizing anti-war demonstrations in the Soviet Union at the height of the Vietnam War was faced with an issue that might be his Vietnam moment as President; Bosnia.  Time Magazine ran a cover story asking, "Will Bosnia be Clinton's Vietnam?"

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Middle East seemed to be where the president focused when it came to foreign policy.  Remember, Saddam Hussein was not removed as the leader of Iraq after allied forces pushed Iraq out of Kuwait in early 1991.  But there was a new enemy starting, one with no borders or nation to speak of.  This was an enemy not of nation, but ideology.  Led by Osama bin Ladin, a terrorist group known as Al-Qaeda; a Sunni pan Islamic organization of militant jihandists.

Around the time of President Clinton's testimony to the grand jury about his relationship with Former White House Intern Monica Lewinsky; bin Ladin's group went into Kenya and bombed the United States Embassy.  Around this time there was a movie starring Dustin Hoffman called WAG THE DOG where the president is involved in a sex scandal at home, so to take the American people's minds off of that the president bombs a foreign nation.  Many haters of Bill Clinton thought that we were living WAG THE DOG in August 1998 when he ordered the bombing of Al-Qaeda camps.  Only Clinton missed his target and he was impeached in December.  This would not be the last we heard of Osama bin Laden.

If you were a child born right after World War II like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were, you were taught about the atrocities toward human life that evil doctors like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin committed to their countrymen.  Genocide was going on in in Kosovo when Yugoslavian forces when Serbian president  Slobodan Milošević tried to take Kosovo and make it part of Greater Albania.  By March 1999, genocide was going on so President Clinton and NATO started a 90 day NATO Airstrikes to drive Milošević's forces out of Kosovo.  It was a campaign during a war where the American forces did not lose a single causality.

But perhaps the greatest event to happen with American foreign policy took place on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 just before nine o'clock in the morning on the East Coast.  The weather all across the country was a beautiful blue skies and decent temperatures late summer day.  There was was just not a cloud in the sky all across the continental United States.  Just then, it happened…

At 8:46AM, American Airlines Flight 11 had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.  At first, everyone thought that it was pilot error, but by 9:03AM when United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower, everyone knew that was no accident.  That was intentional.  Both towers at the World Trade Center collapsed.  And then, at 9:37AM, American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon.  Whoever hijacked these three planes got at the heart of the United States' financial district and at the heart of the military.  Thankfully, United Airlines Flight 93, which was en route to Washington, DC to take out the White House was taken over by vigilant passengers.  Their heroism that day; while all perished when at 10:03AM in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania had stopped an already horrific situation become worse.  The passengers of Flight 93 had saved our government.  In total, the nonhijacked fatalities were 2,977 lives.

While visiting Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff walked up to President George W. Bush at 9:05AM, just minutes after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and whispered in the President's ear; "America is under attack."  President Bush all of the sudden appeared tense, but remained seated as not to upset the children in the classroom.  He would finish reading MY PET GOAT with the children before leaving to oversee this unprecedented crisis.

A month later, the President launched attacks in Afghanistan to take out Al-Qaeda and their leader; Osama bin Laden.  It would take nearly ten years after that launch to finally get bin Laden when President Barack Obama ordered to capture; dispute conflicting advice from such high profile national security advisors like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Osama bin Laden was killed in the attack and the war in Afghanistan went on for another ten years; ending, finally in 2021.

Contemporaries place a lot of the blame on President Joe Biden for getting out of Afghanistan the way that he did, but many forget that it was President Donald Trump, in February 2020 in his Daha Agreement with the Taliban negotiated a withdrawal agreement that released 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set May 1, 2021 as a date certain for final withdrawal.  The Afghanistan government was not part of this negotiation.  Trump would reduce American troop levels from 13,000 to 2,500 all while the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and would welcome Al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.

Never the less, by August 16, 2021, President Joe Biden had declared that America's longest war was now over.

But back to George W. Bush.  The one thing that President Bush was hellbent on was Iraq and Saddam Hussein.  Before he was the Republican Nominee for President in 2000, Governor George W. Bush sat down with is ghost writer, Mickey Herskowitz, for his candidate's autobiography; A CHARGE TO KEEP.  Bush said in this recorded conversation; "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a great commander-in-chief.  My father had all of this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he waisted it.  If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it.  I'm going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

Throughout 2002 and going into 2003; President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and key Cabinet Secretaries like Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went around the country explaining their argument to invade Iraq.  They used every reason from Iraq's Saddam Hussein's link to the attack on September 11, 2001 to weapons of mass destruction or WMDs.  Members of Congress like Senator John Kerry, Senator Joe Biden, and Senator Hillary Clinton voted to support the Iraq Resolution in 2002, just before the Midterm Election.

So Colin Powell goes to the United Nations and warns the world about Saddam Hussein processing WMDs to where on March 17, 2003; President Bush gave Iraq's leader one final ultimatum to remove those WMDs.  Then came the shock and awe.  For the first time since the start of the republic; George W. Bush executed a foreign policy Americans would have never tolerated before and for which we really have no moral authority twenty years later to lecture about.  We, the United States of America invaded a sovereign nation in the Middle East who technically did not provoke us.

Questions, even to this day circulate about if the President invaded Iraq to settle a score with Saddam Hussein that his father did not; as mentioned in A CHARGE TO KEEP.  Others felt that Vice President Cheney was the puppet master pulling the strings to save a company he was associated with since leaving the Defense Department; Halliburton.  When the No bid contracts went to Halliburton to rebuild Iraq after "Mission Accomplished" people were beginning to wonder.

None the less, President Bush declared in May 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that major combat operations were over.  Hussein, who was on the lamb was finally captured in a spider hole in December 2003.  He would be executed three years later.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged on.  George Bush did do something as a result of his wartime record; despite a shaky economy at home, he won re-election in 2004.  It was the first and only time since the Presidential Election of 1988 where a Republican President won both the Electoral Vote and the Popular Vote.

Since the 1990s, American foreign policy was not just about wars.  The presidents used the power of that office to combat climate change and disease, and promote democracies and trade around the world.  But in terms of the latter, after the worldwide financial crisis in 2008; the people's of the world started to feel a little leery about the messiness and slowness the a democratic form of government could do.  Nations around the world; including the United States started looking at strongman autocratic leaders declaring that they alone could fix it.  And then came COVID-19 in 2020, and to this day with higher inflation and lower supplies in goods; the world again feels autocracy is the way to go to give up your freedoms to where on the surface we don't  notice, all in the name of lower prices.

When Donald Trump announced that he was running for president in 2015, many on both sides wondered if he would be too compromised to be president.  Given his credit score in the United States, the Trump family was forced to go outside of the United States to get loans.  Eric Trump said as much when he said that his family gets all of the money they needs from Russia.  Some feared a cozy relationship with strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping.

There were conspiracies surrounding Russian interference to get Donald Trump elected President in 2016.  When confronted about this in a joint press conference In Helsinki with Putin, Trump said that Putin denied involvement in the Election.  Trump would talk about eating chocolate cake with Xi, and that he and Kim had a great relationship with some wonderful love letters.  Donald Trump would even be the first American president to walk across the DMZ into North Korea.  Trump would promote a wall on the southern border, and that to some was a Cold War reminder of Berlin.  He would also sign a Muslim ban.  He would be impeached in 2019 for committing a quid pro quo against the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

As for Joe Biden, he inherited the closing days of the Afghanistan War to which he got flach for how that was done.  But the biggest problem in the current administration; aside from worldwide climate change and disease is the threat of autocracy overtaking democracies.  The biggest hotspot is Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  The new House of Representatives is in control of appropriations and they will decide if and how much the United States will spend to help Ukraine.

In the Post Cold War Era, there is one weapon that is more powerful than bullets and bombs.  That weapon is disinformation and misinformation.  Too many people today are busy with their lives to take a few moments and read or watch the news.  We have become too reliant on social media and depending on your clicks will base what information one receives based on the algorithm.  Information in one echo chamber on either side, or lack of information is a very dangerous thing.  That has been the goal of this collection is to teach about the foreign policy of each president since the end of the Cold War.  Maybe a future leader will take these lessons and create a world of peace and harmony.

See also: The Presidency and the Cold War