America Right or Wrong by Lieven Anatol;

Author:Lieven, Anatol;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Five

The Legacy of the Cold War

Where the hell is Cambodia? People see a headline, and suddenly we’re in trouble in Cambodia. It’s got to be somebody’s fault, so we start attacking somebody. The news is too fast and too confusing. We see a headline, and we go over to the atlas to find out where Cambodia is. Then we attack somebody about it. We do more damn talking about things we don’t know anything about than anybody in history.

—Sam Bloom (Texan businessman, 1960s)1

The cold war perpetuated and strengthened long-standing messianic, paranoid, and Manichaean strands in American nationalism. However, it also added a new element, largely unknown in the United States before World War II, but very important in the history of nationalism elsewhere: a massive military–industrial and security complex with great influence and a stake in promoting armed rivalry with other states.

Since the Vietnam War, the impact of this new force in American affairs has been seen above all in what I have described as the American Nationalist Party, or Republicans. However, it has had a strong presence among the Democrats as well. No one should have been surprised that while the Obama administration took a much more restrained, pragmatic, and multilateral approach than the Bush administration to a number of key issues, it also deferred heavily to the military establishment and remained devoted to preserving American military superiority and American dominance in the world. In the 1990s, although Bill Clinton somewhat reduced the military budget, he also presided over both a still greater extension of the U.S. military presence in the world and a geopolitical campaign to “roll back” the influence of Russia within the former Soviet Union.

This legacy of the cold war had a very damaging effect on U.S. strategy after 9/11, by helping to direct U.S. attention away from the terrorist groups themselves. In the words of James Mann, the collective biographer of the George W. Bush foreign and security policy team, “the Vulcans [the name Bush’s senior foreign and defense policy team gave themselves] were fully prepared to deal with security threats of the sorts they had confronted in the past—major powers, rogue states, dictators and land armies, all entities that operated inside fixed territories and identifiable borders—but they were not as ready to combat a stateless, amorphous terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.”2

Moreover, even in confronting threats from states, their approach was based on a simplistic right-wing cold war paradigm of building up ever stronger American military forces. “The Vulcans were far less active in developing new institutions, diplomacy or other approaches that could deal with these issues.”3

The cold war essentially created all the leading members of the Bush administration’s foreign and security staff. Many had already been senior officials in Republican administrations of the 1970s.4 As the official White House photographer of the Ford administration remarked concerning the George W. Bush administration: “I feel like Rip van Winkle. It’s like I woke up twenty-five years later, and not only are my friends still in power, they’re more powerful than ever.

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