Then, with the Soviet empire in collapse since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and about to spread to Moscow itself the next year, nobody spoke of America as the sole remaining superpower after a long Cold War. Rather, the talk was of two exhausted heavyweight boxers facing off after a long fight that sapped their strength. The Soviet boxer fell first, to be sure, but many spoke of how we teetered in our victory, in not much better shape than the loser. And possibly doomed, at a slower rate, to follow the Soviet Union in decline.
Desert Storm changed all that. I believe that short war created the hyper power image:
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 when we win in Iraq in this current struggle despite the time and cost, look for the stories to come out about how our power is unchallenged.
And eventually, historians will write of how American power changed the Middle East and paved the way for a revolutionary tide of democracy that eventually swept away the teetering and backward despotisms that ruled the Middle East since World War II.
Victory does that for a reputation.
