After the Cold War – A View From 1998 “You would never guess that the Cold War is over. Almost all commentators on foreign policy start off their speeches or articles by performing an obligatory knee bend to the “end of the Cold war” and then continue to talk about our foreign policy as though the Cold War were still going on. They still chatter about “America’s global responsibilities”; they still worry about the scale of US military defenses; they still dither and dabble in world affairs, perhaps even more recklessly than in the 1950s and 60s. We still dole out immense sums of money in foreign aid to various client states; we still maintain the Cold War alliances with Asian and Latin American states that were set up[ as a global defense system, and in NATO we have even expanded the alliance to undertake an undefined “new mission.” Indeed, American foreign policy in the post-Cold War period could perhaps be defined as a “search for a new enemy,” since only the existence of an enemy could justify the continuation of the basic framework of Cold War foreign policy. There have been several candidates for the new enemy – Saddam Hussein, Somalia’s late warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, and more recent Balkan or Arab leaders who have popped up . . . [And clearly] the basic personality of the enemy is always Hitler, and he always exhibits the same demonic cruelty, the same maniacal aggressiveness, and the same psychotic ambitions as der Fuhrer. A few years ago, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explicitly identified transnational crime as the new enemy. “The overall international organized crime threat to our interests is more serious than we had assumed,” Senator Kerry trembled. “Organized crime is the new communism, the new monolithic threat.” In announcing the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Truman claimed that “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want” . . . and in 1965 Lyndon Johnson boasted of his plans to construct what he called “the TVA on the Mekong,” presuming to liberate the Vietnamese peasants from communism in the same way that the TVA was supposed to liberate Tennessee peasants from bootlegging and snake charming. The strategy by which cold War liberals sought to fight communism, then, was simply an extension of their strategy for domestic social reform, and it promised the same rewards for the bureaucratic and managerial elites that were to supervise it.” (After the Cold War, Samuel Francis, Chronicles, September, 1998, excerpts, pg. 36)
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 02:28:06 +0000
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