The Audacity of Hope

Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan made him seem
naive and ineffective.
Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about communism
seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world. I
personally came of age during the Reagan presidency—I was studying international
affairs at Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago—and like
many Democrats in those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the
Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the
funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more
I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm
between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.
But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in
the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand
why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the
Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that U.S.
multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for
poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to
steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military
buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets
militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed
services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that
there was no easy equivalence between East and West—in all this I had no quarrel with
Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his
due, even if I never gave him my vote.
Many people—including many Democrats—did give Reagan their vote, leading
Republicans to argue that his presidency restored America’s foreign policy consensus.
Of course, that consensus was never really tested; Reagan’s war against communism
was mainly carried out through proxies and deficit spending, not the deployment of U.S.
troops. As it was, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a
new world. George H. W. Bush’s return to a more traditional, “realist” foreign policy
would result in a steady management of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and an able
handling of the first Gulf War. But with the American public’s attention focused on the
domestic economy, his skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting
American power did nothing to salvage his presidency.
By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that
America’s post–Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks,
protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton himself understood
that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security
challenges. In addition to promoting free trade and bolstering the international financial
system, his administration would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans
and Northern Ireland and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America,
Africa, and the former Soviet Union. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign
policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. U.S. military
action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not necessity—the product of our
desire to slap down rogue states, perhaps; or a function of humanitarian calculations