The United States came out of the 1990s, if anything, in an even greater position of hegemony and preeminence than it was at the beginning of the 1990s.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.
We have a lot of societal problems that we have to fix in the 1990s.
There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.
The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.
The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.
The United States is a concept that works very well, even in bad times. But that's no reason to think its structure can be superimposed with success on any other part of the world, particularly when times are terrible.
The 'looking forward' so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence.
The United States is much further along because its financial crisis struck three years before Europe's, in 2008, causing headwinds that have pressured it ever since.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
The world is shifting from a hegemonic era, where the United States dominated alone, to a multipolar system.