I largely agree with Peter's recent, insightful post
about U.S. grand strategy, except when he says that "Compared to the Cold War
period, we have more slack in our security environment." In this he echoes Kori's earlier
contention that "The world is much more conducive to
American interests than [during the Cold War]: we are militarily dominant, the
threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to
handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the
ascendancy." This seems to be a
fashionable view. I recently heard an
experienced foreign policy wonk claim at an event in D.C. that the United States currently faces "the lowest level
of existential threat in U.S.
history.
I
disagree quite strongly -- not because the Cold War was such a wonderfully safe
era, but because ours is more dangerous.
Peter and I have both heard the view from our students that the Cold War
was, on hindsight, a time of roses and sunshine, and I think he is right to
criticize it. Our young students confuse
simplicity with safety. It was a simple,
dangerous world: nuclear war was simply
terrifying. I am (just) old
enough to have a living memory of the Cold War and the feeling of dread and
danger it fostered. We were still doing duck-and-cover drills when I was
in the 3rd grade. (Which
always made me wonder: if my 3rd grade
desk was nuclear-bomb-proof, why didn't they make the Pentagon out of the same
material?)
Peter is right that the Cold
War was ridiculously dangerous. During the Cold War the Soviet Union and China had nuclear
and conventional capabilities superior to what North Korea and Iran have today,
and the United States lost some 95,000 troops in two bloody wars in Korea and
Vietnam. During the Cold War the United States and Russia
competed globally; any local conflict had the potential to escalate into global
war in which the American homeland would be directly threatened. This
was without doubt a dangerous era.
Moreover, two things have
changed since then that have made the United States safer. First, Russia's
ideology is not as overtly hostile and globally expansionist as the Soviet
Union's was, shrinking the number of potential flashpoints with the great Bear. Second, the United States is less likely to
be a front-line state in a militarized conflict with Russia (or China) because
the stakes are lower. Some might claim
this settles the argument: we are safer
today than during the Cold War.
However, in my view, these are
the single points on which we can
claim to be safer than during the Cold War.
These considerations are far outweighed by the continuing presence of
other enduring threats coupled with a host of new threats. I wrote an earlier
post about the
greater dangers of our era, but my single, brief,
off-the-cuff comments apparently failed to sway Peter from his view, rooted in
a lifetime (two or three times longer than mine) of research and experience. Alas, the limits of blogging. I'd
like to try again, in a series of posts on the current threats to American
national security in the 21st Century.
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