American Politics from Reagan to Clinton

The Reagan Revolution moved American politics out of the malaise of the 1970s, completing the party realignment that had begun under Nixon. Reagan’s presidency, the first to survive two full terms since Eisenhower’s and the most successful since FDR’s, restored the confidence of most Americans in their nation. His politics were much in evidence in the 1990s, with Clinton accepting the main thrust of the Reagan Revolution in economics and welfare but clashing with the conservative coalition on cultural issues. In foreign policy, the 1980s witnessed both the decline of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Cold War problems, especially in the Middle East. The pivotal years 1989–91 brought both the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and the beginning of Yugoslavia’s ethnic conflicts. In the 1990s, the world was increasingly divided into zones of peace, democracy and economic interdependence on the one hand, and of religious and ethnic conflict, failed states and humanitarian disasters on the other. But foreign policy in the 1990s was not salient for the American public, which basked in the misleading sense of security of the ‘unipolar moment’ and enjoyed the fruits of the two longest economic booms in American history during the Reagan and Clinton years.