This book is a venture in contemporary history, an effort to place in perspective developments that in some respects are not yet fully resolved. Its subject is u.s. foreign policy during the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with a coda encompassing George W. Bush's first year as president. During this period, members of the foreign policy elite, breathing deeply the intoxicating vapors released during the annus mirabilis of 1989, concluded that history stood poised at a turning point. Bill Clinton interpreted the end of the Cold War as signifying "the fullness of time" - a scriptural allusion to the moment when God chose to transform history. The collapse of communism and the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism offered similar prospects for transformation, this time through human rather than divine agency. As the bloody twentieth century drew to a close, God's promise of peace on earth remained unfulfilled; it was now incumbent upon the United States, having ascended to the status of sole superpower, to complete God's work-or, as members of a largely secularized elite preferred it, to guide history toward its intended destination.