While the events of 11 September 2001 had given Putin a welcome chance to portray his aggressive conduct of the war in Chechnya as a war against terrorists – and thereby avoid too vocal a reaction from the West – he had little success in bringing the conflict to a close. His attempts at influencing Russia’s former Soviet neighbour-states to take a more friendly attitude to the new Russia have also mostly backfired. Putin’s most important contribution is to have created some form of economic stability; by 2005, inflation had been stemmed and Russian GDP was gradually increasing. Still, Vladimir Putin, even after his re-re-election in 2011, is likely to be seen as a transitional figure on the way to a new Russian society that re-takes its place among the world’s great centres of power.
Taking a long backward look from the early twenty-first century, the United States, much more clearly than in 1945, was the world’s greatest power. For all the heavy weather of the 1970s and 1980s, and a cavalier piling up of public debt through budgetary deficit, its gigantic economy continued to show over the long run a huge dynamism and seemingly endless power to recover from setbacks. Its slowing as the 1990s drew to a close did not check this. For all the political conservatism which so often struck foreigners, the United States remained one of the most adaptive and rapidly changing societies in the world.
Yet as the last decade of the twentieth century began, many old problems still remained. Prosperity had made it easier for those Americans who did not have to face those problems in person to tolerate them, but it had also provided fuel for the aspirations, fears and resentments of black Americans. This reflected the social and economic progress they had made since the Johnson presidency, the last that had seen a determined effort to legislate black America out of its troubles. Although the first black state governor in the nation’s history took up office in 1990, only a couple of years later the inhabitants of the Watts district of Los Angeles, notorious for their riots a quarter of a century before, again showed that they saw the Los Angeles police force as little more than members of an occupying army. Over the country as a whole, a young black male was seven times more likely than his white contemporary to be murdered, probably by a fellow black, and was more likely to go to prison than to a university. If nearly a quarter of American babies were then being born to unmarried mothers, then two-thirds of black babies were, an index of the breakdown of family life in the black American communities. Crime, major deteriorations in health in some areas, and virtually unpoliceable inner-city areas still left many responsible Americans believing that the nation’s problems were racing away from solution.
In fact, some of the statistics were beginning to look better. If Bill Clinton (who took up the presidency in 1993) disappointed many of his supporters by the legislation he actually could deliver, the Republicans in Congress got much of the blame for that. Although, too, the burgeoning phenomenon of rapidly growing numbers of ‘Hispanic’ Americans, swollen by legal and illegal influx from Mexico and the Caribbean countries, worried many people, President Clinton set aside recommendations to restrict immigration further. The population of those with Hispanic ancestry had doubled in thirty years, and now stands at roughly one-eighth of the total. In California, the richest state, it provided a quarter of the population and a low-wage labour pool; even in Texas, Hispanics were beginning to use politics to make sure their interests were not overlooked. Meanwhile, in a modish figure of speech, Clinton could surf the economic wave. Disappointments in his domestic policy tended to be attributed by supporters to his opponents rather than to his own failures of leadership and excessive care for electoral considerations. Although the Democrats lost control of the legislature in 1994, his re-election in 1996 was a triumph, and success for his party in the mid-term elections followed.
Nevertheless, Clinton’s second presidential term was a disappointment. In his defence it can be said that he had at the outset inherited an office sadly diminished in prestige and power since the Johnson days and the early Nixon years. The authority the presidency had accumulated under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and during the early Cold War had swiftly and dramatically ebbed away after Nixon. But Clinton did nothing to stem the rot. Indeed, for many Americans he made it worse. His personal indiscretions laid him open to much-publicized and prolonged investigations of financial and sexual improprieties, which led in 1999 to an unprecedented event: the hearing of charges by the Senate against an elected president with the aim of bringing about his impeachment. (Coincidentally, in that year an attempted impeachment of Boris Yeltsin also failed.) Yet Clinton’s public-opinion poll ratings stood higher as the hearings began than they had done a year earlier, and the impeachment attempt failed. Those who had voted for him were content, it seemed, with what he was believed to have tried to do, even if they were not oblivious to his defects of character.
As the Clinton terms unrolled, the United States had also come to appear to squander the possibilities of world leadership which had come with the end of the Cold War. Whatever the average reporting of American newspapers and television bulletins, there had seemed then to be for a moment some hope that traditional parochialism might be permanently in eclipse, and that the United States would work with other countries globally to improve conditions for all. Concerns which required continuous and strenuous efforts by the United States in every part of the globe could hardly be ignored. They were indeed to loom larger still in the next ten years, but this was soon obscured by the ambiguities of American policy. Clinton’s aim was first and foremost to assist in the globalization of market economies and for other countries to learn from the success of the United States. While a multilateralist at heart, Clinton was much too careful a politician to risk going against an American public tired of the international campaigns of the Cold War. Many issues that the United States could have taken a lead on, such as world poverty and global ecological issues, were therefore brushed under the carpet in return for his electorate viewing Clinton as ‘the feel-good president’ – he made them feel good in return for doing very little except enriching themselves.
Soon, however, the peace-keeping activities of the United Nations were troubling American policy. While the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the UN in 1995 prompted Clinton to tell his countrymen that to turn their backs on the organization would be to ignore the lessons of history, his remarks were provoked by the action earlier that year of the lower house of the American Congress in proposing to cut the American contribution to the costs of UN peace-keeping – against a background, moreover, of American default on its subscriptions to the normal budget of the UN amounting to over $270 million (nine-tenths of the total arrears from all nations which were owed to the organization). United States policy seemed to reach a turning-point with the collapse of a UN intervention in Somalia in 1993 which had led to casualties among UN forces taking part and to spectacular television footage of the maltreatment of the bodies of American servicemen by enraged and exultant Somalis. Soon, the refusal of American participation in or support of UN intervention in the African states of Burundi and Rwanda showed what disastrous consequences could flow from American refusal to participate, or to permit forceful intervention with ground forces, in peace-keeping, let alone peace-making. In these two small countries, each ethnically bitterly divided for generations into a ruling minority and a subject majority, the outcome in 1995–6 was genocidal massacre. Over 600,000 were killed and millions (out of a total population of only about 13 million for both countries together) were driven into exile as refugees. It seemed the UN could do nothing if Washington would not move.