The Last Foreign-Policy President

Derek Chollet

Security, Americas

George H. W. Bush's four years in office presented challenges as complex and as numerous on the international stage as faced by any president in American history over the course of the entire administration.

Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 608 pp., $35.00.

IT WAS the kind of parade Donald Trump dreams about. On June 8, 1991, hundreds of thousands of spectators flooded Washington’s National Mall to watch over eight thousand troops and a packed trail of tanks, jeeps, helicopters, fighter jets and missiles (as well as a capability few had seen before, a surveillance drone) on display to celebrate the U.S. military’s overwhelming victory against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. According to the New York Times, it was the biggest military spectacle in Washington since Dwight Eisenhower marched victorious American GIs down Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate the end of World War II. The happy crowds honored the troops, and they also cheered their triumphant commander in chief, George H. W. Bush.

At that time President Bush was riding high. His approval rating topped 90 percent, and the smashing military success seemed to end the nation’s long Vietnam hangover. Bush was known to be a cautious leader, memorably caricatured by comedian Dana Carvey with the phrase “wouldn’t be prudent,” but he had taken a huge risk by deploying half a million troops to force Iraq out of Kuwait. He had endured a bitter political debate over the war—one that most Democrats opposed—and came out better than even he expected. Basking in this accomplishment, Bush observed that “there is a new and wonderful feeling in America,” a pride that would end the bitter partisanship of the Cold War. And, he hoped, the Gulf War would prove a harbinger for a different kind of global politics—as he famously called it, a “new world order.”

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