The United States and the Unipolar Moment: How the 1990s Lied to Millennials, a Generation Born in Peace, about the Future
The generation that came of age in America during the first decade of the new millennium has seen profound change at a dizzying pace.
The first years of life for this cohort were filled with a sudden energy, a renewed optimism, and an almost unheard of euphoria that filled the public discourse and created a culture without limits, seemingly unrestrained by fear or by the limitations of relative poverty, lack of opportunity, or threats in the world on the open horizon.
The collective hopelessness that had dragged so many into their own oblivion before, jobless and mired in despair, or unrealized and taking pains to avoid their own castigation, the feeling that they were to blame for themselves, this had all but vanished from the majority of American life.
Of course, in some pockets of the nation this prosperity was distant then still. African-Americans, Latinos, and poor whites, underserved populations were mostly left out of this broad and shared prosperity due to structural barriers and the legacies of history and injustice. But the gains of America’s newfound and generalized post-war economic growth seemed to filter into nearly every aspect of American life at the time. The increases in income, the reductions made to poverty, the wealth that accumulated with the bottom half of American society, were present wherever one looked.
From the inside looking out, things were much the same. After the violent struggles between Western democracy and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century and, in the latter half, Western democracy and capitalism on the one hand and the communist system of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states on the other, the West emerged seemingly victorious from the contests.
The United States was the undisputed global leader of the “free world”. The nation that had bankrolled the Western alliance in World War II, and nearly alone stood against the Soviet Union under the threat of mutually assured destruction and conflict had no equal in military, economic, or political power anywhere in the world. The world seemed open to American influence and power, and America slowly but surely began to wield that power around the world in more assertive ways.
American foreign policy theorists, particularly imperialist liberals and neoconservatives, and the establishment began to float above the clouds, constructing new ideologies and practices for a world without a rival or peer competitor state to restrain American ambitions. Liberal democracy, capitalism, and economic integration were the dominant export of American ambition, and many countries followed America’s lead into the seemingly more open and prosperous future that the United States promised the world if only it would follow its example.
This situation existed as the generation born during and after the end of the Cold War came of age. It was a birthright, proclaimed by our parents and the culture they lived in, born of some long-suffering endurance that had made the country and the world safe for democracy and for prosperity. They said that these things were meant to be. They said that these things must exist by virtue of the inherent supremacy of our ideals, freedom and democracy. They said that the destiny of the nation was to sit astride the world as a global force for good. They said that these things were destined for us, for the nation as a whole.
So this generation grew, and their attitudes, perspectives, and hopes and dreams were shaped by the powers around them, by the culture that taught them. They were told that anything was possible in a meritocratic society. They were told that they could be “whatever they wanted.”
They were counseled of the lack of limitations placed on them and their lives, their total lack of necessity. They were told these things, but not advised much more. The culture and the mood were euphoric, and full of wondrous gazing at the sky above.
The blue skies were open to all who traveled there, above the rolling mountains capped in white and grey snow. They were riding high into a future of hope and possibility, the roaring thunder parting ways from before them as the light storied clouds enveloped their route and seemed to guide the way.
All things were possible then, and our generation listened to the hope. The nation was sheltered from the brutality of world affairs and the looming problems hovering over us all which sat just over the end of the plains. We believed only in what we saw, and we thought nothing of the future.
But the truth is that none of the promises made by our parents and the mood of the nation to this generation of people were ever realistic or able to be fulfilled in the long-run. Our broadly shared prosperity was stolen by a kleptocratic elite bent on subverting the means of government to ensure its own profits at the expense of the public. The far reaching wealth and rising incomes which seemed to lift all boats with a rising tide out from below the grinding rocks at water’s edge, this too began to disintegrate.
For every dollar of wealth produced by a worker today, far less actually remains with him or her. Most of the wealth produced rises to the very top, enriching those who the means of production and government controls are manipulated to benefit.
And the society that, when we came of age, seemed more free, more tolerant, more democratic than at any point in its history, this too has begun a sort of descent into factionalized, tribal warfare between opposing political camps. The nearly complete fracturing of the American consciousness has happened in the lifetime of this generation.
Outside our borders as well, the unipolar moment that America enjoyed at the top of world politics has all but ended. Our leaders and foreign policy establishment gambled on America’s power to try to remake the world in its own image through culture, influence, diplomacy, and the exporting of American systems and norms at every turn. The reluctance to use military force for political aims that burdened the Clinton administration and American government for most of the 1990’s ended in the early 2000’s.
But in the rush to defend ourselves from perceived threats, real or imagined, we wasted countless lives, treasure, and good will around the world. We committed ourselves to changing countries with no history of democracy into Western-leaning liberal bastions at the point of a gun.
We invested our tax dollars in propping up kleptocratic corrupt regimes without the will to fight for a foreign experiment they knew nothing about. We waged global war to destroy anyone who espoused hatred for Americans and the West, and acted on such intentions. We overspent and over-committed. And our nation paid the price for its own recklessness. The public paid the price for its failure to pay attention.
The truth is that now, while we stand at the edge of the abyss of open warfare in Europe for the first time in 75 years, while a rising China seeks to dominate Asia and upend the international order that America helped create, and while the climate crisis threatens to destroy us all, the world is much more hazardous for peace and our collective survival than ever. The stakes are higher than they once were.
Our generation came of age when it was easy to focus on the immediate term, and not consider the long-term consequences of our actions or inaction. The public was misinformed, and lied to, to benefit the interests of a select few for profit and glory. The majority of the American people were lost and scattered in a complex web of data and information.
Most Americans couldn’t make heads or tails of the facts, the priorities, the decisions necessary to maintain world peace and security. We couldn’t see the problems on the horizon. We were taken advantage of by those who knew better.
America had a chance to shape itself and the world in a way that maintained broad and shared prosperity, peace and security, and environmental stability. But on the whole, we failed to seize the unipolar moment for what it really was. We failed to use that chance to secure the moment for the future, to build on the best of American power and contribute to a world free from war.
We failed to live rightly by our ideals and not in hypocrisy. We failed to take advantage of that moment to create lasting security, and not intimidation and coercion. And most of all, we failed to use our chance to live up to the promises made to our children of a future filled with prosperity and hope. The costs of that failure are only just revealing themselves.
