Introduces the strategic and political consequences of the Iraq War, the main argument, how this history of containment fits in with existing scholarship on the Iraq War, and how the larger context of the post–Cold War world affected the policy of containment.

This chapter argues that in Bill Clinton's first term containment worked well enough to limit the Iraqi threat, compel more cooperation with inspectors, and generally maintain the international coalition as well as domestic political support. Clinton's main change to containment was stressing compliance with the UN inspections rather than Saddam's removal as the main condition for the lifting of sanctions. His Iraq policy, however, was sandwiched between an international coalition that wanted to move toward normalization with Iraq and a domestic political sphere that wanted to intensify efforts to topple Saddam. Finally, developments in Iraq, especially the extent of Iraqi cheating on disarmament and Saddam's crushing of the internal opposition in 1995–1996, added greater legitimacy to the main ideas of the regime change consensus, especially the beliefs that containment would soon collapse and that Iraq would never comply fully with inspections because of the nature of its regime.

This chapter focuses on the strong support Poland’s Solidarity movement received from the USA’s largest trade union, the AFL-CIO. At least partly, this chapter shows, the AFL-CIO’s strong advocacy for Solidarity has to be seen within US political debates triggered by the election of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s rhetoric, Communist totalitarianism came to denote only the most extreme form of the general threat of the modern state to silently encroach on the lives of individuals. Even as he revived the ideological Cold War, Reagan went on to reshape the social imagery underpinning it – a change that entailed curbing the power of organized labor. Against this background, Solidarity fascinated the AFL-CIO not primarily as an anti-Communist movement, but as a trade union. As Reagan reduced the influence of trade unions, the AFL-CIO invoked Solidarity to argue that it was not human rights as such that expressed the difference between East and West, but a particular human right – freedom of association. In the United States, the chapter demonstrates, Solidarity became a contested icon in a political and intellectual struggle initiated not by different foreign policy aims – in this field, the AFL-CIO agreed with Reagan – but by a reconfiguration of the normative and conceptual world of US politics.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.

This chapter investigates how and why the cultural capital of literary fiction increasingly became aligned with liberalism and the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. It introduces a unique historical perspective that moves away from well-trodden narratives about how modern progressive liberalism, the sixties counterculture, or the New Left altered the landscape of literary fiction, and toward a broader political narrative that interrogates the impact of conservatism as an ideological force on American fiction after the 1960s. This shift in conservative literary taste was a historical contingency, a largely unintended byproduct of arguments between three strains of the post-sixties American Right: the triptych of William F. Buckley’s movement conservatism, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, and the reactionary populist New Right. To advance its argument, this chapter concentrates primarily on the writings of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, two major postwar novelists who wrote several of the most critically acclaimed works of the era, but who were eventually seen as occupying very different positions in the political literary fields: Bellow’s literary prestige declining as he was aligned with neoconservativism and the American Right, and Pynchon’s literary prestige increasing as he was aligned with various strands of the New Left and the broader counterculture.

This chapter considers Raymond Aron’s position in the intellectual history of liberalism from several angles. It argues that in relation to the Dreyfusard liberalism of his teachers’ generation his attitude was mostly critical but that he played a crucial role in the formulation of what has since come to be known as cold war liberalism. The chapter also offers a critique of the notion of a ‘French liberal revival’ and concludes by considering the implications of Aron’s oeuvre for the crisis of liberalism in the early twenty-first century.

‘1989’ marked the start of an era of Westernization and liberalization. The disillusionment with this politics of convergence began in Russia in the mid-1990s, and then reached Eastern Europe a decade later. The economic crisis of 2008 broke faith in the superiority of the Western model, whilst accession to the European Union removed the political conditionality that had previously disciplined local politics. Powerful illiberal movements, in alliance with populist authoritarians in the West, challenged the naturalisation of liberalisation. The migration of their populations westwards and the ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 sparked fantasies of demographic catastrophe. Against this background, such movements presented the East as the ‘true Europe’, defending its whiteness, Christianity, and heterosexuality against extra-European immigrants and a decadent West. They looked to new alliances with authoritarian and populists in China, Turkey, and the United States too. In so doing such populists reimagined their region’s place beyond Western-style politics, EU conditionality, and a Euro-Atlantic space. There was significant resistance though: EU officials, local centrist parties, and civic mobilizations continued to embrace 1989 as a symbol of unfulfilled hopes of democratic transformation.