ABSTRACT
In 1993, a few months after the inauguration of President Clinton, I accepted his nomination as Director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). It was a time of transition, an unsettling time, for the USIA. The Cold War was over. The months of celebration and the victory lap were behind us. What next? It might be argued that the “Cold War” had “ended” several times: with détente, in the early 1970s, with “coexistence” later. But several experiences of U.S. national humiliation, the Vietnam era, the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s, and the aftermath of the first Iraq war, had whetted the desire for a victory celebration. It did occur to some that what was really being celebrated was the “collapse” of the Russian economy, a “collapse” whose consequences lingered for more than a decade and which may well be a subject of some reconsideration and study in decades to come, given the US role is urging policies that provoked and made the “collapse” more damaging to the Russian economy and national pride than might have been the case with alternative policies.
