The Short Century

The Short American Century, which began in 1945 and continued until 2016, was made up of four distinct eras. The first, from the victory in World War II until the student rebellions of 1968, was an era of confidence in which most Americans believed that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan provided just cause for the United States’ domination of the “free world.” The second, which lasted until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, was an era of skepticism—the failures of Fordism at home and the Vietnam War abroad suggested to many that global American “leadership” might not be achievable at an acceptable cost. The third, which comprised the 1980s, was an era of exuberance, as deregulation, financialization, and a renewed American militarism reinvigorated a hegemonic project that the 1970s had almost annihilated. And the fourth and final era, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was characterized by a hubris that insisted the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrated the ultimate triumph of US-style democratic-­capitalist imperialism.