Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
An expectation in the land of rainbows and unicorns. In the real world, where I lived in those days, there were still a lot of threats to the Free World as time quickly proved.The idea in the 1990s was that we didn't need a military capable of going toe to toe with the Red Army in central Europe. The peace dividend was always an expectation in American history.
I would not say Clinton was an isolationist. I think the 1990s was the peak of American influence, power, reputation. Clinton started expanding NATO, he used military force - twice - to stop Serbian genocide, and NATO was more unified than it had ever been before the 1990s. Our reputation was never better, I remember seeing Russian kids wearing t-shirts with American flags. That would never happen today.
The Democratic policies of the 1990s were isolationist in both nature and results, even if not in name. I'm not saying the US shouldn't have cut back our military in certain areas post-USSR, but the Democrats did to the US military and intelligence agencies what DOGE did to USAid and the Federal government.
As we are experiencing with Trump, it's a lot easier to burn bridges than to build them. The Democrats had a slash and burn strategy for cutting the military into a beach defense force and converted the intelligence agencies into a satellite monitoring service.
I retired from the military in 1998 and watched it all go down. 8 years earlier I'd earned my MS in International Relations and recognized all the threats of the time....and I was an average assessor of the coming problems. 9/11 wasn't a surprise because of the attack. Most officers I knew expected a major attack on US soil within a few years. The surprise was the audaciousness of the attack. As the 9/11 report stated, it was a failure of imagination....and the Democratic Party shares just as much responsibility for it as GW Bush and his Oil assholes.
