What were the 1990s all about in America if not a nation intoxicated by the perfume of change and drunk on the promise of technology? We chose a free-associating futurist, Newt Gingrich, to run Congress and a president who painted word pictures of a sunny bridge to the 21st century. Business leaders chanted the mantra "change or die," while the newsstands were full of magazines offering to teach us how to make change our friend. There was a giddiness to it all. In the future, people would live forever, and the Dow would never go down. Only fuddy-duddies and Luddites and cranks saw any drawbacks to the future.
But other people, including some cranks in caves, were taking a very different view of change and of the future. They were asking which changes they could prevent, which ones they could reverse, and which changes they could turn into weapons against the future, judo-style. They failed to rivet our attention because we didn't think they merited attention; they weren't with the program. But guess what? Because of those people, the "bleeding edge" of change that hip people enjoyed talking about 10 years ago has turned out to involve a lot of actual bleeding.
Amid nuclear tension, a North Korean soldier peers past South Korean border guards.
(Kim Kyung-Hoon - Reuters)
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The unsettling signs and portents of the late 1990s now strike us as the burps and tremors of a volcano that was about to blow. The decadent trivia of politics in those years -- the sex scandals, the debates over hairdos, the millionaires and billionaires seeking to buy themselves high offices, the extreme niche-marketing of issues that once led President Clinton to offer a White House initiative on child safety seats -- all these combine into a sort of barometer of our national blindness, and, as such, were truly historic -- because they represent a generalized failure of the futuristic hyperpower to see even the slightest distance into the actual future.
Time and money wasted on such trivia could have been used instead to plan for the menaces sure to crop up in the wreckage of the Cold War. Those years could have been used to begin creating the new international institutions, treaties and alliances that would allow the United States to lead and stabilize the world without violating the tested principle of checks and balances. They might have been used to craft a new strategy for avoiding nuclear war that would have as much weight and urgency behind it as the old strategy had.
To be fair, American leaders have tried, in various ways, to engage the future. President Clinton pulled Bosnia back from the brink of chaos. The first President Bush built a coalition to enforce the U.N. mandate to liberate Kuwait. More recently, George W. Bush offered a doctrine of preemptive action to replace the now-inadequate Cold War deterrence theory.
But none of these efforts have so far proved compelling enough to mark a clear path forward.
Along Big Think Boulevard, people have their doubts whether America's leaders, from either party, will be able to brace the public for what promises to be a long and often unpleasant engagement with our clouded future. There is, after all, a strong and deep vein of isolationism bred in the American character. If one day in the not-so-far-off tomorrow we find that we must choose, for example, between paying the costs of global leadership and paying the pensions of our burgeoning retiree class, isn't it likely that we will pull back -- whether or not there is an acceptable nation ready to step into the void?
Again and again, I heard big thinkers draw a contrast between this era and another hugely historic period: the immediate aftermath of World War II. They noted the alacrity with which the Allies, seasoned by economic depression and catastrophic war, pivoted to comprehend and face the future. The war ended in 1945. The following year, Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech warning of Soviet expansionism. The next year, 1947, George Kennan laid out the strategy of "containment" that was quickly embraced by a bipartisan consensus of Western leaders, and the massively expensive Marshall Plan was launched. By 1948, President Harry Truman had established the doctrine that would guide Western foreign policy through Democratic and Republican administrations for the next 40-plus years. And in 1949 NATO was created to implement that policy.
Four years to reinvent the world.
I got a lot of shrugs and groans when I asked if anyone perceives a similar vision and unity of purpose today. Mead chose to answer by quoting Churchill. "He said, You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing -- after exhausting all the other possibilities."
THERE CAME A POINT IN THIS INVESTIGATION WHEN I NEEDED TO HEAR THE BRIGHT SIDE, if there was one, in meatier form than the empty campaign-season exhortations that were leading the morning newspapers. So I sought out Joshua Muravchik, whose specialty is studying the spread of democracy and freedom around the world. His little office is located at the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington's oldest and most influential think tanks, where Muravchik is a resident scholar. AEI occupies several floors of a nondescript Washington high-rise just off Big Think Boulevard -- a gray building on a gray street under gray skies the morning I visited.
Muravchik is a neoconservative of the purest type, meaning that he started out some 40 years ago as a hawkish Democrat and today is a hawkish Republican. He is different from the classic conservatives of the GOP -- the "old-o-cons," as some call themselves. Neocons are more likely to eagerly seek out opportunities to change the world; old-o-cons are more likely to advise caution, on the theory that the world's biggest problem, namely human nature, is stubbornly resistant to change.
Neocons in the Bush administration got much of the credit -- or blame, take your pick -- for the decision to invade Iraq. So when you meet a thinker of this sort, you might expect a fire-breather. Muravchik, however, turned out to be a genial fellow of winning humility. "You're asking big questions," he said right off the bat. "I'll probably get myself into trouble here."
Then in he dove. Sure, he said, we're looking at a tricky and scary patch of history ahead. And yes, eventually, history will erode America's dominance. "Obviously, our time on top won't last forever. Everything comes to an end. But whether it lasts another 50 years or 500 years, I can't say. My guess is, this has a long way yet to go."
He believes this because he sees a strong historical tide flowing in our direction. "For how many millennia was the world run by kings and warlords?" Muravchik asked. "And then the first elected democracy springs to life in 1776. It was a very imperfect democracy, a slave democracy, but still it contained this idea that people would elect a government temporarily and then a few years later elect a new one.
"How many people participated? A small group: The entire political polity of the early United States was what -- a million people? From then to now is a blink of an eye in historical terms. But today, of the 192 countries in the world . . . 120 have elected governments." Granted, many of those are far from true democracies, but 89 qualify as "free" nations, Muravchik said, in which citizens elect their leaders and enjoy human rights guaranteed by the rule of law.
"Not all of that was accomplished by the United States," he concluded, "but it began with the American model." This "remarkable triumph of American ideas" leaves him in the "long-run view . . . optimistic."
The neocon had the same worry as the rest of the Big Think gang: that Americans, bloodied by Iraq, scorned by former allies, ill-served by squabbling leaders, will elect to pull back from a menacing world. "People could say: 'This is crazy! Bush bit off more than we could chew. We have a good life here . . . let's just batten down the hatches,' " Muravchik said.
My mind drifted back to that evening in Rome, and my vision of the happy lives of the formerly dominant.
"The withdrawal of American power would stir fears all over the world," Muravchik went on, puncturing my reverie. "It would create temptations, because the people who rule nations are very ambitious men. Some would act on those ambitions. The result would be lots of bloodshed, and at some point, we would be dragged back in."
At that point, history suggests, things would look even worse than they do now.
I came away from Big Think Boulevard having reached a few conclusions, for what they are worth.
The end of history was a dream, lovely and fleeting.
While we slumbered, the grass grew very tall.
Now we have to cut it, and if there is an easy way to accomplish the job, no one knows what it is.
And last: The very hope that such work would ever become easy -- the eternal but vain wish that history will level off into a broad and tranquil, sunlit meadow -- is a big part of the reason we're in such trouble. The most enticing dreams can be the most dangerous.
David Von Drehle is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
