The Penguin History of the World

Bush and Blair would have escaped some of the criticism they came in for after the invasion of Iraq if the occupation of that country had been better planned. Instead, parts of the country fell into anarchy after the collapse of the regime, as basic services stopped and the economy faltered. Looting and lawlessness were widespread for months after Iraqis – much helped by an American tank – toppled Saddam’s statue in the centre of Baghdad. Even though relations between the main ethnic and religious groups in Iraq would have been difficult to handle for any post-Saddam authority, the lack of security and the economic chaos helped inflame the situation. The majority Shia Muslims – long oppressed by the former Ba’ath regime’s mainly Sunni leaders – flocked to their religious guides for direction, many of whom wanted to establish an Islamic state similar to that in Iran. Meanwhile, a number of revolts started in the Sunni parts of the country, based both on Saddam loyalists, and, increasingly, on Sunni Islamists both from Iraq and other Arab countries. The new Iraqi authorities – a weak coalition government dominated by Shias – remained dependent on United States military support, while the Kurdish northern part of the country set up its own institutions separate from those in Baghdad.

By the end of the Cold War, the United States plainly exercised the first global hegemony in history. Its first attempts at exercising that hegemony had been stuttering, to say the least. The massacre of innocent lives on 11 September 2001 had set America in a direction that had led to the alienation of many of its friends and a war that it seemed unable to win fully or to withdraw from. As a result, soon after having won re-election in 2004, Bush the younger was more unpopular than any other president in living memory, except Richard Nixon when he faced imminent impeachment. But in spite of the invasion of Iraq having undone both Bush’s presidency and Tony Blair’s prime-ministership, there were few others who could come up with better recipes for how to employ American power in the post-Cold War world. Americans themselves were divided between those who thought the lesson of Iraq was more isolationism and those who wanted more multilateralism; more importantly, the rest of the world, while often complaining about the consequences of American unilateral action, had very little to put in its place when confronted with major crises. At the end of the post-Cold War era, the region in which civilization began had given birth to yet another twist in history’s long tale. The dismal fate of intruders and invaders in Mesopotamia was nothing new; the global predominance of one country clearly was. The United States undoubtedly had the power to remake international affairs, but was, as the Bush era ended, very uncertain about how to employ that power.

The United States elections in 2008 became an emphatic repudiation of the Bush years. Even the Republican candidate did not find much to defend in the former president’s record. But the most remarkable aspect of the election was that the Democratic Party nominated an African-American, Barack Obama, to be its standard-bearer. Obama’s message was to give America back the hope that it could be a transformational nation, not just domestically but internationally. He repudiated the interventionism of the 2000s, and declared that the United States would wield power by co-operating with others on a global scale. Obama’s popularity, both at home and abroad, initially marked him out as a president who hit the spirit of the age better than anyone since John Kennedy, and his beautifully crafted speeches promised change, although often of a rather undefined kind.

But the capacity for fundamental change eluded Obama, not least because he had inherited from his predecessor the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some economies had already noticed the potential for severe instability in the late 1990s, during the Asian banking crisis, or in Russia’s fickle casino capitalism (which by the 2000s had made a large majority of its people regret the collapse of Soviet-era security). In the United States the failure of one of its largest energy companies, Enron, in 2001, and, in particular, of the two main government-sponsored mortgage companies in the summer of 2008, should have set off alarm bells about some of the basic operating principles of the market. But the way the Cold War had ended, the seemingly all-conquering power of the marketplace, and some of the more radical free-market ideas that went along with it, had shunted most regulatory mechanisms aside. The system was posed for a fall.