Rethinking the 1990s: Liberal World Order-Building in the Aftermath of the Cold War

In the decade following the end of the Cold War, Western democracies stood victorious, brimming with optimism and grand designs. Today, the 1990s look less like a great triumph for liberal democracy and Western modernity than a decade in which post-Cold War excitement and anticipation obscured a slowly gathering global storm. At a time of intensifying geopolitical rivalry, economic nationalism, and ideological extremism, Rethinking the 1990s brings together a group of leading political scientists and historians who look back on that era of world-historical change to identify choices and pathways that have brought the world to this unsettled moment. Authors explore whether the United States and other countries could have made different choices in the 1990s to place the world order then envisioned by Western policymakers on a firmer foundation.

Written in a highly engaging style, these wide-ranging essays offer new insight into the strategic choices, political trade-offs, and missed opportunities of that historic decade as well as much-needed perspective on the international pressures and domestic cross-pressures fracturing the liberal order today.

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-2019, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014, he was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ikenberry is the author of eight books, most recently, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism in the Making of Modern World Order, and Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order.

Peter Trubowitz is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan United States Center at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. His research focuses on international security, domestic politics and foreign policy, and party politics. His published work includes Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order from Foundation to Fracture, with Brian Burgoon, Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft, and Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy, which won the annual J. David Greenstone Prize for best book on politics and history.