This chapter traces the Army’s rehabilitation of its reputation in the wake of the Vietnam War. Two features were central to this transformation: the first was the advent of the All-Volunteer Force and the post-Vietnam reforms to Army training, equipment and doctrine. After a shaky start, the All-Volunteer Force’s success normalised the notion of soldiering as an occupation rather than an obligation, and reforms seemed to create a much more professional and competent force than the one that was wracked by unrest and uncertainty. Second, the Army’s performance in Operation Desert Storm affirmed this narrative of professionalism and competence. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the aftermath of the war. The celebrations that took place to welcome home Gulf War veterans stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II. Representing a crucial moment in the American public’s deepening veneration for US soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.

Chapter 12 is the story of Iraqi reparations imposed after the Gulf War. The rise in Iraqi indebtedness was a consequence of global geopolitical trends in the 1980s, when political lending trumped solvency concerns. It allowed Iraq to obtain financing on terms more favourable than offered by the US government. Reparations were a consequence of the end of the Iran–Iraq War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Reparations were imposed by a UN Resolution with a direct enforcement mechanism to take money from oil revenues. I use oral history sources to trace how Iraqi debt was restructured after the US invasion in 2003. The restructuring was permeated by politics to inflict harsh terms on creditors at the Paris Club, at a time when creditor-friendly restructurings were the norm. Despite its apparent success, however, in going for a politically expedient deal at the Paris Club, I argue the restructuring missed an opportunity to enshrine a doctrine of odious debt in international law. All debt was written off, except war reparations, which were paid in full through sanctions and war. They proved to be senior to all other debt and did not enter the sovereign debt restructuring.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

The Australian Army’s commitment to the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1972 had much in common with its commitments to previous wars. Again the issues of strategy and command were important. In the Boer War, the two world wars, Korea, Malaya and Malaysia, Australian Army formations and units came under the operational control of an allied commander. Australia had little say over the higher strategic direction of the war or indeed over the strategy employed within each theatre of war. The main exception to that pattern was in the South-West Pacific Area between 1942 and 1944 when the Allied commander-in-chief, General Douglas MacArthur, was based in Australia and discussed his strategic plans with the Australian Government, although ultimate direction came from the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Furthermore, the Commander of the Allied Land Forces, General Sir Thomas Blamey, had a measure of independence in determining how and where the units of the Australian Army would fight.

This chapter examines how the first Bush administration built domestic and international coalitions to respond to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. I argue that Bush's plan for the Persian Gulf War was to weaken Saddam as much as possible and then establish a system of containment based on multilateral sanctions, inspections, and military deterrence in the aftermath. The administration hoped Saddam would fall from power as a result of the conflict but did not make this a policy goal to avoid breaking up the international coalition and bogging the United States down in occupying Iraq. Lastly, this chapter examines domestic political debates on Iraq during the Gulf Crisis and explores the conflict between “minimalists,” who wanted to focus on ejecting Saddam from Kuwait, and “maximalists,” who wanted to use the crisis to ensure Saddam's removal.”

This chapter shows how the United States and its allies established a containment regime on Iraq after the Gulf War in the hope of using sanctions to compel Saddam to cooperate with UN weapons inspections. This chapter argues that despite the military victory in the Gulf War, a political narrative emerged in 1991 that Bush had missed several opportunities to overthrow Saddam and abandoned rebels who rose up against the Iraqi government, making the Gulf War a flawed victory. As Saddam obstructed inspections and challenged containment over the next two years, Democrats and neoconservatives developed the argument that containment could not address the Iraqi threat because it did not target the Iraqi regime, the source of its misbehavior, for removal. Containment thus became the US policy toward Iraq in an atmosphere of disappointment and recrimination that created a political bias against restrained approaches to Iraq and in favor of the more immediate pursuit of regime change.

Chapter 1 examines Israel’s foreign policy response to the end of the Cold War. It analyses events such as the 1991 Gulf War and the ensuing Madrid peace conference. It explains how domestic factors drove Israel to adopt a foreign policy of entrenchment amid events related to the end of the Cold War. This stance hinged on basing Israel’s regional foreign policy on its iron wall of military might rather than on diplomacy, and making peace with the Arab world in exchange for peace, not territory. The Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel had captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, would be granted limited autonomy, but remain under Israeli military occupation.The chapter engages with and adds to the literature on specific episodes including Israel’s response to the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the Madrid peace conference.

Examines George H. W. Bush’s efforts to establish a new world order and reliance on traditional Cold War strategies and alliances. Assesses Bush Sr.’s successes (e.g. German reunification) and failures (in Yugoslavia and Iraq). Documents beginning of post-Cold War US wars of Muslim liberation, a pattern continued by the presdients that followed him.

Since the Vietnam War, the US Army has struggled with deep cultural issues that have impacted the ability of its leadership to think strategically. In the years following its defeat in Vietnam, the army reestablished its cultural foundations by revamping its doctrine, training, recruiting, professional military education, and equipment with a singular focus on conventional combat. These advances, along with development of advanced information systems and guided munitions, led to victory in the Gulf War, but blinded army leaders as to the larger realm of warfare. The invasion of Iraq seemed wildly successful initially, but senior policy makers assumed peace would follow and turn battlefield triumph into political success. When instead the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq morphed into guerrilla struggles, army leaders were at a loss. Since then, the army has undergone a renaissance of sorts, creating new doctrine and organizations for counterinsurgency warfare and retraining its members to adapt to irregular conflict. It remains to be seen whether these innovations will be permanent, or if the army will slide back into the culturally ingrained mind-set that the only wars worth fighting are large, conventional conflicts. Culture evolves slowly; it remains to be seen whether the army can overcome its anti-intellectual, heroic mind-set in favor of a more balanced mentality.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

It is critical to understand the political objective or aim for which the war is being fought. These aims can be offensive, such as seizing a piece of a neighbor’s territory, or defensive, meaning holding what one has. This gives us a firm analytical foundation and the why of the war. One must understand the value each combatant places on the objectives because this helps determine the nature of the war, how long it will be fought, where, and at what cost. But we must remember that the objectives can change. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes this is bad. Leaders must understand when this happens and the effects, because changing the objective means you have embarked upon a different or even a new war and thus changed its nature. For example, the US changed from a limited to an unlimited objective during the Korean War when it decided to destroy the North Korean regime and unify the peninsula. In Iraq in 2003, the US fought the war to overthrow Saddam’s rule – an unlimited aim – but was soon fighting to prop up the new government it had established – a limited, defensive aim. The political aim determines everything.