ABSTRACT
By the end of 1993 Clinton felt some nostalgia for the Cold War. Its demise had removed the stability of bipolarity and the easily defined strategic priorities that went with it. These had helped to structure both the Western Alliance and US policy options, including difficult decisions such as whether or not to intervene in other states. Nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War, and nine years after President Bush’s announcement during the Gulf War of a New World Order, the US still strives to redefine its role amidst an international terrain that is more variegated and demands new thinking. Dramatic change has fomented the most far ranging debate about US foreign policy since the Second World War. It embraces worries about decline, hopes for democracy, and an upsurge of neo-isolationism. This latter phenomenon has been spawned by fears of foreign economic challenges to US jobs and a naive belief that a fortress America could rise above both foreign security challenges and the entanglements of complex economic interdependence. After Bush’s internationalism came Clinton’s more isolationist focus on domestic affairs. As the most resonant anecdote of the 1992 presidential election campaign claimed: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. Despite this conviction, Clinton’s preoccupation with domestic affairs gradually gave way to the demands of the foreign domain. By late 1995, he mused at one point that the longer he experienced office ‘the more I become convinced that there is no longer a clear distinction between what is foreign and domestic.’2
