NYT: November 23, 2007
What Holiday from History?
By Kurt Campbell
(Kurt Campbell is an expert on Asia and security issues who is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. He served in the Pentagon in the Clinton administration, in charge of Asia/Pacific issues, and earlier taught at Harvard. Kurt has written widely, for popular and academic audiences, about everything from Japan to nuclear policy.)
Just last week, two of the Republican presidential aspirants uttered again the oft-repeated refrain that the 1990s represented a “holiday from history,” an era of irresponsibility and lollygagging from the relentless demands of global politics. This is a theme now widely heard in the effort – mostly by Republicans – to depict the ’90s as a fundamentally unserious decade. President Bush and his lieutenants have been expert not only in defining the current security environment in ways favorable to dominant Republican thinking and interests, but they have also been wildly successful in shaping public perspectives about the past, particularly the Clinton era.
This contemporary conservative myth-making is one of the essential features of modern Republicanism, and pains have beentaken to devote sufficient resources not simply to shape future debates but to rewrite old ones.
Take for instance the president’s characterization of the 1990’s during his second inaugural address, just as the hopes of a new bipartisan approach to the new global challenges were fading in the wind: “After the shipwreck of communism,” Bush declared, “came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical – and then there came a day of fire.” The language perfectly captures the Bushist critique of the Democrats; elitist in their university cocoons or trial lawyer firms, fundamentally lazy, and lucky too. Thank God Republicans were finally back in power when things got serious on 9/11.
Yet this picture of being lost in the 1990’s, of a Gatsby-like holiday from history during a fun-filled and frolicking interwar period, ignores all of the drama that played out almost exclusively in America’s favor during this supposedly relaxed decade. Indeed, the 1990’s involved enormous and important good works internationally and helped set the scene for continued American power on the global stage. Increasingly, the first Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration can be seen in retrospect as essentially fitting together to complete a decade of accomplishment that paints President George W. Bush’s subsequent term in office as an outlier....
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...if there is to be a debate about the conduct of America’s global role during the 1990s and the larger meaning of the decade itself, I would simply quote the current resident of the White House – bring it on.
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/what-holiday-from-history/
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