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Throughout the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union were the two super powers; after the cold war,
- the U.S. was the only super power to come out of it. The world had become uni-polar but that did not mean the U.S. could control the war; Bill Clinton understood the limitations between the U.S. and the rest of the world. He was somewhat cautious because he knew it would not be easy nor cheap to change structures in other countries; on one level, the world level was becoming interdependent, or making countries more global or globalization; fragmentation was another part which threatened interdependence. During the 1990’s, there was growing globalization but also there was more and more
- fragmentation, which included the breaking of the Soviet Union & so on
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Benjamin Barber wrote a book over different objects including
- MTV, Mac Book, and McDonalds and related these 3 things to markets and economies of different countries; he suggested that in this new world, democracy might be the casualty. America wanted to annex Canada, but not Mexico, because they did not care about them; George W. Bush made a new treaty of NAFTA which helped trade in North America; in 1994, a new world trade organization came together. It was not essentially democratic and the rules were under the WTO; Bill Clinton also emphasized opening up trade with Southeastern Asia. This brought a new relationship with Vietnam; after the
- downfall of the Zygon government, we had not tried making new relationships with them.
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Obviously Europe continued to have a huge impact with trading with the U.S. and they began to make a new relationship with
Russia and hoping to get better commercial relationships with them. The open door continued to be a huge goal for the U.S. in the 1990’s and self determination, which was a big problem; as the Soviet Union fell, a question was what self determination does on their part. The U.S. had new relationships with Eastern Europe and most of the Middle East as well;
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in 1994 with the rebellion in Chechnya, Bush made a new government
- in that area. The people were Muslim and you had ethnic and religious conflict so the U.S. used self determination there and that meant there would not be a full break off of Russia, but the Republic of Russia should itself be unitary even
- though it was not associated with the main part of the Soviet Union.
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National self determination created a problem in the Middle East;
for the most part, the U.S. tried helping the existing states and made new relationships with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The Israelis took over the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis started expanding their settlements; Bill Clinton tried making relations with them but ultimately no solution was made with them. Somalia created another problem with the Clinton Administration;
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Late in 1992, the U.S. and the UN began to move toward involvement in
Somalia. The problem was the number of warlords within the country; the Security Council and America adopted a resolution with assistance to Somalia and give them food. The UN wanted American troops to help distribute this food and after checking, Bush did use some 25,000 troops were assigned to Somalia and were in operation restore hope.
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A warlord in Somalia killed 18 U.S. troops and humiliated them;
- Clinton ended up pulling out the troops so they didn’t have to go to war with an Eastern African country. Nation building in
- Somalia was not productive at all, which showed how much power America had in other countries.
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In Haiti, during George H.W. Bush in 1990,
- Haiti held an election which was the first free elections they had; in the first successful democratic election, a Roman
- Catholic priest emerged as the winner. Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the election and in 1991 was the president; in September, a couple months later, he was taken over in a military coup. This was not the type of self determination that Bush wanted; Bill Clinton took a different perspective and wanted democracy to succeed in Haiti.
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Clinton did not want Haitians coming over to the U.S. so he wanted
- to strengthen democracy in Haiti; the Governors Island agreement called for the restoration of the established government, a
- freely elected government with Aristide as the president back in Haiti. Bill Clinton put on the pressure and sent 3 top American officials to Haiti, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn were sent; all 3 of them in late September flew down there and wanted to convince Raoul Cedras to leave. Clinton was making a military force to be sent to Haiti and Cedras saw this via CNN news and because of this, he decided he should negotiate with the 3 leaders of America. This led to the restoration of Aristide as president in Haiti; but he did not want to run for the next election.
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The issue of self determination was problematic in Yugoslavia;
- in the case of Russia, Bush authorized the breakup of Yugoslavia which became a new nation state after WWI. Bush basically wanted to maintain existing main states and nonetheless some of the states became independent from Yugoslavia and maintained it; there was a lot of ethnic and religious diversity within these nation states. Bush did not want to recognize these until after Britain did, in which they ended up doing; the UN wanted to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs and should not fly over Bosnia and not to become militarily involved. They also wanted an arms embargo on both parties, which hurt Bosnia more than it did the Serbs; Warren Christopher also started working with Bosnia and Herzegovina to try to split
- the country.
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The U.S. became increasingly involved because of the ethnic cleansing
between the countries which was being show on television; the contact group of the 5 main powers were working with the UN and in 1995, Bill Clinton became more deeply involved and wanted somehow to end the war.
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