More than two hundred years after the birth of the United States, Colin Powell referred to the unfinished nature of the American promise when he declared that the question of America’s role in the world “isn’t answered yet.” In fact, the end of the Cold War, the rise of international terrorism, and the George W. Bush administration’s doctrines of preemption and unilateralism sparked new debates over the long-standing question of how the United States should act beyond its borders.

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Nor had Americans set to rest questions about the role of government at home. In a population greatly composed of people fleeing oppressive governments, Americans had always debated what responsibilities the government should shoulder and what was best left to private enterprise, families, churches, and other voluntary institutions. Far more than other industrialized democracies, the United States had relied on private rather than public obligation, individual rather than collective solutions. In the twentieth century, Americans had significantly enlarged the federal government’s powers and responsibilities, but the years since the 1960s had seen a decline of trust in government’s ability to improve people’s lives, even as a poverty rate of 20 percent among children continued and a growing gap between rich and poor intensified into the twenty-first century.

The shifting of control of the government back and forth between Republicans and Democrats from 1989 to 2016 revealed a dynamic debate over government’s role in domestic affairs. The first Bush administration’s civil rights measure for people with disabilities, Clinton’s incremental reforms, and Obama’s Affordable Care Act built on a deep-rooted tradition that sought to realize the American promise of justice and human well-being. Those who mobilized against the ravages of globalization worked internationally for what populists, progressives, New Deal reformers, and activists of the 1960s had sought for the domestic population: protection of individual rights, curbs on capitalism, assistance for victims of rapid economic change, and fiscal policies that placed greater responsibility on those best able to pay for the collective good. Even the second Bush administration, which sought to limit government’s reach, supported the No Child Left Behind Act and the Medicare prescription drug program; it departed from traditional conservative policy in a gigantic program to bail out failing businesses when the Great Recession struck in 2008. The controversy surrounding Obama’s efforts to stimulate the economy and reform health care and the financial industry replayed America’s long-standing debate about the government’s appropriate role.

The United States became more embedded in the global economy as products, information, and people crossed borders with amazing speed and frequency. New waves of immigration altered the face of the American population and the makeup of its culture. Although the end of the Cold War brought about unanticipated cooperation between the United States and its former enemies, globalization also contributed to the threat of deadly terrorism within America’s own borders. In response to those dangers, the second Bush administration launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican presidents sought to maintain the preeminence in the world that the United States had held since World War II, but debate continued about how much it could accomplish in other parts of the world and where and how best to use American power.

See the Selected Bibliography for this chapter in the Appendix.