In March 1997, Sandy Berger attempted formally to spell out the foreign policy agenda for the second Clinton term. Speaking in Washington DC, he declared: ‘I have come here today not only to praise the “Post-Cold War Era” but to bury it.’ According to Berger, the period since the fall of the Berlin Wall had seen an unprecedented spurt of global integration: both economic and technological, and always underpinned by the expansion and ultimate universalisation of democratic values. So far, the world had been grappling with the new integrative dynamism, without fully appreciating the degree to which the new era was producing its own opportunities and problems – opportunities and problems with which the norms and institutions inherited from the Cold War years could no longer cope. The challenge now was ‘to build up new institutions and understandings’ – including the creation of an undivided, peaceful Europe, the achievement of a cooperative order in the Asia Pacific, accepting the ‘inescapable reality that America can often be the decisive force for peace in the world, creating the multilateral means to combat ‘transnational security threats’, building ‘an open trading system for the 21st century’, and funding ‘an American diplomacy fit for international partnership and ‘sharing the burdens with likeminded nations’.1