There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed "realists" and boasted of his lack of "the vision thing," and then the reactionary Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators. Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush's first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.
Ledeen has a point but he misses the importance of Desert Shield in 1990 and Desert Storm in 1991 in pushing democracy forward.
Remember that this war took place in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the Soviets in retreat in Eastern Europe, many saw the Cold War as ending because of Gorbachov's decisions or as the end of a long exhausting struggle that the US was winning only by default--the last of two combatants to drop their sword and collapse to the bloody ground.
Could we have pursued our course of action with this view of us--and our power--intact?
What changed this developing view of the end of the Cold War was, first of all, our ability to bribe and coerce a large coalition (so how much did we pay for those Egyptian and Syrian divisions that affected the military campaign not a bit?) to go to war on our side. The enemy didn't even matter for this purpose. The point was that instead of a Cold War division of states, choosing sides as they always did between the US and USSR, the world aligned itself with us. Moscow just watched, unable and unwilling to affect the outcome.
Then the war itself, with a stunning display of our military power that crushed the enemy, cemented the view that American power was unstoppable. We beat a mini-USSR with its Soviet equipment and oppressive government. The proxy victory showed Soviet hardware (or Chinese copies) burning and abandoned in the desert, and left us supreme. No longer the exhausted, lucky survivor; we were victorious. And we felt victorious.
And when, by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union, too, went kaput, we became the hyperpower. The progression was clear: Cold War deadlock; Soviet irrelevance; American military victory; collapse of Soviet Union.
So even as we stood up after staggering under the terrible blows of the Twin Towers and Pentagon (and marveled at the first counter-attack in the air over Pennsylvania) and we looked at how we could combat the forces of evil that 9-11 thrust into our awareness, we could assume a freedom of action that was unique. We could use our power to protect ourselves and continue the revolutionary age that began in Spain. This time taking it into the region that had resisted progress and democracy for so long and which had cultivated a sick version of Islam that worshipped death.
Look, I claim no prescience. I was a realist. But the 9-11 attacks shocked me into realizing we had to go after the states that supported terror as much as we needed to kill the terrorists. But my embrace of realism has led me to agree that we must push democracy to protect ourselves. This idealistic impulse was always present. I do remember the events of Algeria as the 1990s began, where the government suspended the elections when the Islamists did well. I remember thinking that with the Soviet Union unable to exploit this to cause trouble we should have welcomed democracy and risked chaos. It wasn't our call, but I was willing to risk democracy. Now I see no choice. It doesn't mean we push everywhere equally hard. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia require different paths than Egypt or Iran. But it should be our goal.
So do not look at the 1990s as a lost decade. It began with events that cemented our hold on global power and gave us the confidence to use that power in our defense.
