Historicizing the Post–Cold War: Re-examining Debates on Iraq and American Decline

This paper attempts to historicize debates about America’s post-Cold War foreign policy. As the United States became mired in the Greater Middle East, states such as Russia and China gained strength and eventually challenged an American-led, post-Cold War order. Whether or not America’s relative decline was inevitable – and whom to blame if it was not – has been the focus of intense debates. Realists and liberals, as well as proponents of theories such as “the end of history” and “the clash of civilizations” rooted their descriptions of American post-Cold War foreign policy within assumptions about an inherent or even scientific nature of world order. With some historical distance, this paper puts aside claims about the intrinsic qualities of post-Cold War international relations. By contrast, this paper considers those theories within their historical setting, as both products of and influencers on their time and place. The paper will focus specifically on the central place of Iraq and the Iraq Wars in American foreign policy. It will attempt to show how American policies toward Iraq from 1990 onward both reflected and shaped assumptions about world order.