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IN HIS MOSCOW HOTEL ROOM IN APRIL 1988, RONALD REAGAN’S national security adviser, Colin L. Powell, contemplated Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms that would dramatically alter the Soviet Union’s government and economy. Powell recalled, “I realized that one phase of my life had ended, and another was about to begin. Up until now, as a soldier, my mission had been to confront, contain, and, if necessary, combat communism. Now I had to think about a world without a Cold War.”

Colin Powell was born in Harlem in 1937, the son of Jamaican immigrants who worked in a garment factory. At the City College of New York, he joined the army’s Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program and, on graduation in 1958, began a lifelong career in military and public service, rising to the highest rank of four-star general. He stayed in the army because “I loved what I was doing,” but he also knew that “for a black, no other avenue in American society offered so much opportunity.” Powell’s service in Vietnam taught him that “you do not squander courage and lives without clear purpose, without the country’s backing, and without full commitment.” In his subsequent positions as national security adviser to Ronald Reagan, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, and secretary of state under George W. Bush, Powell endeavored to keep his country out of “halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.”

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Powell’s sense that Gorbachev’s reforms would transform the Cold War became a reality more quickly than anyone anticipated. Eastern Europe threw off communism in 1989, and the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Throughout the 1990s, as the lone superpower, the United States deployed military and diplomatic power during episodes of instability in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia, almost always in concert with other major nations. In 1991, the United States led a United Nations–authorized force of twenty-eight nations to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

In the 1990s, Powell remarked that “neither of the two major parties fits me comfortably.” Many Americans seemed to agree: From 1988 to 2016, they elected two Republicans—George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush—and two Democrats—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—as president, and each faced Congresses where the opposing party controlled at least one house. Bipartisan cooperation produced a few initiatives, including disability rights legislation, welfare reform, drug benefits under Medicare, and expanded federal involvement in public education. But the most far-reaching law—expansion and reform of health care—passed without one Republican vote. In the face of congressional stalemate, Obama used executive powers to achieve modest reforms in the areas of immigration, environmental protection, minimum wage, and gay and transgender rights.

All four presidents supported globalization. As capital, products, information, and people crossed national boundaries in greater numbers and at greater speed, a surge of immigration rivaled the stream that had brought Powell’s parents to the United States. Powell shared the worldwide shock when in September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., exposed American vulnerability to horrifying threats. The United States sent soldiers into Afghanistan to overthrow the government that had harbored the attackers. The administration’s response to terrorism overwhelmed Secretary of State Powell’s commitments to internationalism, multilateralism, and military restraint when, in 2003, George W. Bush began a second war against Iraq. The unpopularity of that war and a severe financial crisis helped the Democrats regain power and elect Barack Obama as the first African American president in 2008. Obama pursued a more multilateral approach and improved the U.S. image abroad. Nonetheless, although the Iraq War ended, the Middle East grew more unstable and terrorism remained a threat around the world.