Bill Clinton desperately wanted a pithy slogan to encapsulate his foreign policy. But nothing worked. “Post cold-war era” was uninspiring. “Democratic enlargement” sounded like an unwelcome medical condition. “Age of hope” was too like the title of a New Age album. “We can litanize and analyze all we want, but until people can say it in a phrase, we’re sunk,” he snapped at his advisers in the fall of 1994.

The president never succeeded. “Containment” of the Soviet Union described policy through the Cold War, helping to make a mortal threat seem manageable. For the past seven years, “war on terror” has made a manageable threat seem mortal. The years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 remain nameless.

In “America Between the Wars,” Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier argue that anonymity doesn’t equal irrelevance. The 12-year period may now look like a patternless jumble -- Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, Nafta, Rwanda, Seattle, Kosovo -- but we can learn much from it. “The challenges confronting America,” the authors write, “did not start on 9/11. They began when the cold war ended a decade earlier.”

This statement isn’t technically accurate. Islamic terrorists, for example, blew up buildings before 1989. But the general point is a good one.

For example, George W. Bush’s unilateralism is clearly rooted in a 1992 policy paper written by the staff of Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time. More interestingly, Madeleine Albright may have encouraged its growth with her invocations of the “indispensable nation.” Russia’s current antipathy toward the United States surely derives partly from the decision to expand NATO well east of the old Iron Curtain. America’s military presence in Saudi Arabia after Operation Desert Storm inspired Osama bin Laden’s first fatwa.

Both authors served in the Clinton administration State Department, but they also show a faint nostalgia for the first Bush presidency. George H. W. Bush didn’t seek undeserved credit when the Berlin Wall came down, and he genuinely tried to build international consensus. He even tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade Cuba to support the first Iraq war. The current president may haunt his father’s legacy. But if the elder Bush could run again against Bill Clinton -- busy much of this year dismantling his own reputation -- it’s not clear whom the authors would vote for.

The book’s flaw is its familiarity. There are no surprising heroes or villains; there are few surprising stories or scenes. Though Chollet and Goldgeier have conducted valuable interviews with many of the key players, little will feel new to people who read the newspapers carefully during the 1990s.

To take one example, while describing the Asian financial meltdown of the mid-1990s, they write, “Whether the critics were correct” that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his colleagues “had caused the economic disaster, or whether Time was right that they had saved the world, there was no denying that these unelected American officials were shaping the globalization debate.” That’s true, but we knew so then. And after 10 pages of lucid discussion and description, we don’t know whether Chollet and Goldgeier think Rubin saved the world or set it up for future ruin -- a question with profound implications for today and tomorrow.

Straight history like this is valuable, particularly for an oft-neglected era. But as hinted at by the ambiguous title, the book doesn’t fulfill its promise of reinterpretation. “America Between the Wars,” after all, could describe any peaceful era since independence.

At the end, Chollet and Goldgeier seem to be in the same place as President Clinton in 1994. Yes, a lot happened in this era. But no one is exactly sure what it meant -- or what it should be called.