Seems like yesterday

The 30th anniversary of “Operation Desert Storm” came and went with hardly anyone noticing.

What is more often called the First Gulf War (after we had a second) ended in a broadly satisfactory way, with Kuwait liberated and an unprovoked act of aggression by a despotic neighbor punished. George H.W. Bush was right to go to war to restore the regional balance of power and protect the vulnerable Saudi oil fields, which would have likely been Saddam’s next and more valuable target in his ambition to become the new

Saladin.

“No blood for oil” was a stupid slogan because blood will always be spilled to defend vital national interests and there are few more vital than the flow of oil through the straits of Hormuz.

Unlike many at the time, I also thought that Bush was right to stop the war when he did, with Saddam still in power and possessing a sufficient remnant of military power to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions. His abrupt seizure of Iraq’s “19th province” had upset the balance of power in the region, but toppling him, as we discovered 12 years later when son finished father’s supposedly unfinished business, would have likely upset it even more in the opposite direction, splintering Iraq and removing a crucial bulwark to more malignant Iranian influence.

What we sometimes forget, however, is that Desert Storm was just one of many dramatic events from the late 1980s through the early 1990s that were thought to have created a “new world order” (and in which behavior like Saddam’s would no longer be tolerated).

In 1989, we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the empire in Eastern Europe that Stalin had constructed after the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht back to Berlin. Germany would be united again in the heart of Europe the next year, restoring Bismarck’s handiwork, there being no rationale for the existence of a separate German state that was no longer communist, and regardless of Margaret Thatcher’s warnings about a revival of German militarism.

If things in the East were coming apart in what Mikhail Gorbachev called “our common European home,” in the West they were coming together, with a dramatic acceleration of the integration project — what had begun in the 1950s as the “Common Market” had now become the European Union (EU), with membership expanding across the continent and more direct challenges to nation-state sovereignty, including the common currency (euro) specified by the Maastricht Treaty.

The “United States of Europe” envisioned after the European Civil War (World Wars I and II) by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman no longer seemed quite so preposterous.

Along such lines, the most important event in the lifetime of just about anyone capable of reading this column — the collapse of the “evil empire” just two years after the fall of the Wall — brought a grateful end to Cold War and the nuclear arms race (the Soviet imperium having, like others before it, crumbled from the outside in).

Indeed, few in the mid-1980s would have imagined that within only a few years Lech Walesa would become president of a post-Communist Poland and Václav Havel president of a post-communist Czechoslovakia. Or that Nelson Mandela would shortly thereafter become president of a post-Apartheid South Africa.

The “Global Democratic Revolution” (what Samuel Huntington referred to as the “third wave” of democratization) was fully underway, and for the first time in history there would be more democracies than dictatorships and more people living under governments of their own choosing than not.

Michael Howard said it was the “springtime of nations.” Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed capitalist democracy to be the “end of history” (rather than, as we feared, Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat).

And at the center of it all was America and its triumphant experiment in democracy and freedom, as the “unipolar moment” turned into the “unipolar era” and the values that undergirded the American founding appeared to finally stand unopposed.

Even the most intractable of human conflicts seemed amenable to the spirit of the new age, as Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn before a beaming Bill Clinton.

Yes, the Chinese Communists had brutally suppressed the Tiananmen Square movement, but most observers felt this constituted merely a reprieve, that it was only a matter of time before Deng Xiaoping and his cronies went the way of Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Wojciech Jaruzelski.

And as for the socialist paradise just 90 miles from Florida, one of the hottest-selling books on foreign affairs in 1992 was Andres Oppenheimer’s “Castro’s Final Hour.”

And then it all came apart — genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, a new czar in Russia, Kim Jong Un, the mullahs and their nuclear program, Xi Jinping and an unreformed China unleashing a deadly pandemic on the world, and a 20 percent decline in the number of democratic states over the last decade.

And for America, 9/11 and “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession, hyperpolarization propelled by Trump upheaval and a woke assault on its most fundamental values, and a national debt racing past its GDP.

Call it the revenge of history.