Defining Moments

I? 1991, the Gulf War and evidence of civil strife in Yugoslavia and elsewhere brought to a quick end any hope that the demise of the Cold War would inaugurate a brave new world order. Although Iraq's aggression was defeated by an overwhelming display of U.S. military power, as well as by an unprecedented exercise in collective security, it served as a reminder that the future was likely to include many more new conflicts, always costly and often deadly. Nearly everywhere in the West, the mood has turned inward and become apprehensive. Such gloom in the West is not new, to be sure. Throughout the Cold War, predictions of likely defeats and impending disasters were common, as political leaders gave up on the future too early and too readily. In the mid-1970s, for example, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's evocation of an "unhappy" world allegedly "going toward catastrophe" was largely shared during a decade that opened with reminders of pre-World War I crises— from Fashoda to Sarajevo—all designed to point to a drift toward superpower confrontation in either the Third World or in central Europe.1 But, however flawed these analogies were, they rested on much substantive