Ronald Reagan’s role in facilitating the end of the Cold War was among his most important achievements. Overall, his presidency left a mixed legacy. Despite his pledge to get the federal government “off our backs,” he could not ultimately reduce its size or scope. Social Security and other entitlement programs remained untouched, and enormous military spending outweighed cuts in other programs. Determined not to divide the country, Reagan did not actively push controversial policies espoused by the Religious Right. He called for tax credits for private religious schools, restrictions on abortions, and a constitutional amendment to permit prayer in public schools, but he did not expend his political capital to secure these measures.

While Reagan failed to roll back the social welfare and regulatory state of the New Deal–Great Society era, he changed the dynamic of American politics. The Reagan presidency restored popular belief that America — and individual Americans — could enjoy increasing prosperity. And his antigovernment rhetoric won many adherents, as did his bold and fiscally aggressive tax cuts. Social-welfare liberalism, ascendant since 1933, remained intact but was now on the defensive — led by Reagan, conservatives had changed the political conversation.

Election of 1988 George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president and successor, was not beloved by conservatives, who did not see him as one of their own. But he possessed an insider’s familiarity with government and a long list of powerful allies, accumulated over three decades of public service. Bush’s route to the White House reflected the post-Reagan alignments in American politics. In the primaries, he faced a spirited challenge from Pat Robertson, the archconservative televangelist whose influence and profile had grown during Reagan’s two terms. After securing the presidential nomination, which he won largely because of his fierce loyalty to Reagan, Bush felt compelled to select as his vice-presidential running mate an unknown and inexperienced Indiana senator, Dan Quayle. Bush hoped that Quayle would help secure the Christian “family values” vote upholding the traditional nuclear family and Christian morality. Robertson’s challenge and Quayle’s selection showed that the Religious Right had become a major force in Republican politics.

On the Democratic side, Jesse Jackson became the first African American to challenge for a major-party nomination, winning eleven states in primary and caucus voting. However, the much less charismatic Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis, emerged as the Democratic nominee. Dukakis, a liberal from the Northeast, proved unable to win back the constituencies Democrats had lost in the 1970s: southern whites, midwestern blue-collar Catholics, and middle-class suburbanites. Indeed, Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, baited Dukakis by calling him a “card-carrying liberal,” a not-so-subtle reference to J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 phrase “card-carrying communist.” Bush won with 53 percent of the vote, a larger margin of victory than Reagan’s in 1980. The election confirmed a new pattern in presidential politics that would last through the turn of the twenty-first century: every four years, Americans would refight the battles of the 1960s, with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other.

Middle East The end of the Cold War left the United States as the world’s only military superpower and raised the prospect of what President Bush called a “new world order” dominated by the United States and its European and Asian allies. American officials and diplomats presumed that U.S. interests should prevail in this new environment, but they now confronted an array of regional, religious, and ethnic conflicts that defied easy solutions. None were more pressing or more complex than those in the Middle East — the oil-rich lands stretching from Iran to Algeria. Middle Eastern conflicts would dominate the foreign policy of the United States for the next two decades, replacing the Cold War at the center of American geopolitics.

After Carter’s success negotiating the 1979 Egypt-Israel treaty at Camp David, there were few bright spots in U.S. Middle Eastern diplomacy. In 1982, the Reagan administration supported Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, a military operation intended to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But when Lebanese militants, angered at U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel, killed 241 American marines, Reagan abruptly withdrew the forces. Three years later, Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and along the West Bank of the Jordan River — territories occupied by Israel since 1967 — mounted an intifada, a civilian uprising against Israeli authority. In response, American diplomats stepped up their efforts to persuade the PLO and Arab nations to accept the legitimacy of Israel and to convince the Israelis to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Neither initiative met with much success. Unable, or unwilling, to solve the region’s most intractable problems and burdened by a history of support for undemocratic regimes in Middle Eastern countries, the United States was not seen by residents of the region as an honest broker.

Persian Gulf War American interest in a reliable supply of oil from the region led the United States into a short but consequential war in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. Ten years earlier, in September 1980, the revolutionary Shiite Islamic nation of Iran, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, came under attack from Iraq, a secular state headed by the dictator Saddam Hussein. The fighting was intense and long lasting — a war of attrition that claimed a million casualties. Reagan supported Hussein with military intelligence and other aid — in order to maintain supplies of Iraqi oil, undermine Iran, and preserve a balance of power in the Middle East. Finally, in 1988, an armistice ended the inconclusive war, with both sides still claiming the territory that sparked the conflict.

Two years later, in August 1990, Hussein went to war to expand Iraq’s boundaries and oil supply. Believing (erroneously) that he still had the support of the United States, Hussein sent in troops and quickly conquered Kuwait, Iraq’s small, oil-rich neighbor, and threatened Saudi Arabia, the site of one-fifth of the world’s known oil reserves and an informal ally of the United States. To preserve Western access to oil, President George H. W. Bush sponsored a series of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council calling for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. When Hussein refused, Bush successfully prodded the UN to authorize the use of force, and the president organized a military coalition of thirty-four nations. Dividing mostly along party lines, the Republican-led House of Representatives authorized American participation by a vote of 252 to 182, and the Democratic-led Senate agreed by the close margin of 52 to 47.

The coalition forces led by the United States quickly won the Persian Gulf War for the “liberation of Kuwait.” To avoid a protracted struggle and retain French and Russian support for the UN coalition, Bush decided against occupying Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power. Instead, he won passage of UN Resolution 687, which imposed economic sanctions against Iraq unless it allowed unfettered inspection of its weapons systems, destroyed all biological and chemical arms, and unconditionally pledged not to develop nuclear weapons. The military victory, the low incidence of American casualties, and the quick withdrawal produced a euphoric reaction at home. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” Bush announced, and his approval rating shot up precipitously. But Saddam Hussein remained a formidable power in the region, and in March 2003, he would become the pretext for Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, to initiate another war in Iraq — one that would be much more protracted, expensive, and bloody for Americans and Iraqis alike (see “The Invasion of Iraq” in Chapter 31).

Thus the end of the Cold War brought not peace, but a new American presence in the Middle East. For half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union had tried to divide the world into two rival economic and ideological blocs: communist and capitalist. The next decades promised a new set of struggles, one of them between a Western-led agenda of economic and cultural globalization and an anti-Western ideology of Muslim and Arab regionalism. Still more post-Cold War shifts were coming into view as well. One was the spectacular emergence of the European Union as a massive united trading bloc, economic engine, and global political force. Another was the equally spectacular economic growth in China, which was just beginning to take off in the early 1990s. The post–Cold War world promised to be a multipolar one, with great centers of power in Europe, the United States, and East Asia, and seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East.