Of course, what was neat about the field of Soviet studies was the same thing that was neat about Star Trek: Much as in the short-run TV show encompassing only seventy-nine episodes, there were only so many “stories” in the Cold War you needed to master in order to be considered professionally trained. As with the show, you could memorize most of the dialogue (“We will bury you!” “Beam us up, Scotty!”) and all of the main characters (Andrei Gromyko, Pavel Chekhov). But while such mastery gave one the confidence to enter any classroom or graduate seminar, I couldn’t help feeling as if my fledgling academic career in the late 1980s were one big game of Trivial Pursuit. I wasn’t creating anything, I was just rearranging matryoshka dolls (“Gorbachev fits inside Andropov, who fits inside Brezhnev, who fits inside Khrushchev, who . . .”).
Looking back on it now, I curse myself for not paying more attention to the world around me. I read newspapers and journals by the boxload, but I wasn’t really trying to parse events out against some larger arc of history that, if I had been more imaginative in my reasoning, I would have realized was there all along. Because, like everyone else, I viewed the world through this bipolar prism, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
In retrospect, the entire Cold War effectively ended around 1973. For all practical purposes, the whole conclusion to the struggle had been predetermined by that point. The rest of the Cold War was simply waiting around for the inevitable. No wonder it all seemed so stultifying.
What I mean by the entire Cold War effectively ending in the early 1970s is that the historical arc of that superpower rivalry basically peaked at that point. In essence, everyone on both sides fundamentally made their peace with the bipolar order, meaning from then on, the Soviets could have their chunk of the world and we weren’t going to hassle them much, and the West could have its chunk of the world and they weren’t going to hassle us much. Sure, we’d both keep sticking it to each other with spies, proxy wars in exotic Third World locales, and cheating at the Olympics (on their side only), but the chance for significant changes in the “correlation of forces,” much less for global nuclear war, basically evaporated around that time.
On the Soviet side, President Leonid Brezhnev made his peace with both his own public and Eastern Europe, saying, in effect, pretend to obey me and I’ll pretend to rule you. On the U.S. side, having gone through the self-destructive effort of trying to capture the Cold War “bridge too far” called Vietnam, we basically retired the whole anti-Communist hysteria of the past and started—thanks to President Richard Nixon and eventual Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—looking at the Soviets more like a global mafia we could tolerate rather than Nazis we needed to exterminate. Thanks also to Nixon and Kissinger, most of the serious hatchets were buried not only between Moscow and Washington (détente), but between Peking and Washington (and “Nixon goes to China” entered our political lexicon). We signed all sorts of agreements with Moscow that made them feel legitimate in Europe in a way they never felt before. We gave Taiwan’s seat on the UN Security Council to the People’s Republic. We let Russian ballerinas tour the United States and we sent Ping-Pong players to China. We even started calling Peking Beijing to make them happy.
Why is it important to realize that the Cold War really ended in 1973 and not in 1989? Because the world we are dealing with today largely emerged between those two dates. Between 1973 and 1989 the world evolved dramatically. We just did not notice it because America was still so focused on the superpower rivalry with the Soviets. During these years the Middle East shifted from being a strategic backwater to the main focus of U.S. military responses around the world, China began its amazing evolution from Mao Zedong’s isolated society to Deng Xiaoping’s emerging market, and globalization expanded beyond the Old Core of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan to include the “new globalizers” in Latin America and Developing Asia. By staying so fixated on the Soviet threat for so long, we missed a new global security order long in the making. When America finally woke up from the Cold War, we found that new strategic environment so unfamiliar that we experienced brain-lock, retreating from the grand strategy of containment to a fearful reliance on “chaos” as our guiding principle.
A good way to capture the rise and fall of the Cold War is to examine the rule sets that defined the strategic nuclear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union across the decades. Think of a long historical arc that started with our first use of nuclear weapons in 1945 and extended until the Soviet Union formally disbanded at the end of 1991. At the beginning of that arc, there were essentially no rule sets to guide our use of nukes or our defense against the Soviet weapons that soon followed. This was the truly scary time that extended deep into the 1950s—the time of “duck and cover” that my eldest siblings remember from their parochial school days. During this rising phase, we were constantly being caught unaware by “gaps,” or dramatic unbalances that seem to suggest the nascent nuclear rule set could collapse in a sneak attack at any moment. There were “bomber gaps” and “missile gaps” that dominated our security agenda for significant stretches. This stressful period wore heavily on the minds of many Americans, who inwardly debated the question of “Better Red than dead?”
That unstable strategic relationship hit a spike with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Fortunately for the planet, key people on both sides stepped back and took a deep breath before doing anything disastrously stupid. At that point, our side had a serious heart-to-heart with itself, asking if there wasn’t a better way to manage this volatile relationship that had the potential to evaporate the planet thanks to a moment of careless misperception. There was an overwhelming sense that we needed a better rule set, and so, as we so often have done in American history, we simply invented one—Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD.
The story of how this came about is instructive for today’s contentious debates over the new strategy of preemptive war. The notion that nuclear war was effectively unwinnable, and therefore the strategic standoff between us and the Soviets was far more stable than most people realized, had been voiced by plenty of experts prior to the Cuban missile crisis.◈ But after that close call, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara took the bold step of elevating it to a permanent cornerstone of U.S. strategic nuclear planning. To a lot of Americans at that time, the acronym MAD was descriptive in more ways than one—it just seemed plain crazy to believe neither side would ever use these weapons against the other in the future. Humanity had never before created a weapon it did not use, and so it seemed inconceivable that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be the only times the world would ever see nuclear weapons fired in anger.
Yet that is exactly what has happened—to date. But nuclear weapons did a whole lot more than hold the superpower rivalry in check, they basically ended war among great powers, the definition of which, over time, merged with that of “nuclear power.” In other words, to have nukes meant you were a great power, and to be a great power meant you never went to war with other great powers, thanks to nukes. When the United States created the new rule set called Mutually Assured Destruction, it did nothing less than kill great-power war for all time. It is no coincidence that no two great powers have ever gone to war with each other since 1945, the year America invented nuclear weapons. It took us almost two decades to come to that understanding—to recognize that essential rule-set change. But when we did, and successfully exported that rule set to other great powers, the threat of global war basically ended in human history.
That is how powerful a new security rule set can be in terms of shaping world history, which is why it is so very crucial that today, as America seeks to export this new security rule set called preemptive war, we are very careful in making sure this strategic concept is correctly understood. In short, preemptive war is not a tool for reordering the Core’s security structure, as some fear. Rather, it is an instrument by which the Core should collectively seek to extend its stable security rule set into the essentially lawless Gap. Our goal
should be nothing less than effectively killing transnational terrorism for all time.
MAD was a stroke of sheer brilliance on McNamara’s part, for he recognized the existential deterrence that already existed between the United States and the Soviet Union—if only we had the courage and common sense to realize it. By existential deterrence I mean simply that nuclear weapons aren’t for the using but for the having. By having them in sufficient number to assure the Soviet Union’s demise following any first strike they might launch, we maintained the conditions for unwinnable war—and that’s all the Cold War required in the end. So whatever crimes some believe McNamara later committed during the Vietnam War, in my mind they’re greatly overshadowed by this one great act of securing global peace.
Of course, it wasn’t enough for just the United States to understand and adhere to the notions of MAD; we had to convince the Soviets of this wisdom. That effort to educate the Soviets took several years, but graduation came finally in the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreement in 1972 at the Moscow summit between Nixon and Brezhnev. That summit, plus two additional ones between these leaders in subsequent years, effectively concluded the Cold War by greatly diminishing the threat of global nuclear war and implicitly codifying the rules of the rivalry from here on out (e.g., unlimited conventional arms sales to client state—okay; Third World proxy wars—okay; nuclear brinkmanship anywhere—not okay; conventional brinkmanship in Europe—not okay).
Sure, there would still be arms races, double-crossing moles, and all sorts of heated rhetoric right up to the very end, but this was just history playing itself out. Like a marriage that dies long before divorce papers are filed, this bipolar relationship, despite all its attendant mood swings, effectively entered its predetermined decline in the early 1970s. The Soviets would engage in one last gasp of ideologically driven optimism in the late 1970s, when they began supporting the “countries of socialist orientation,” clustered mostly in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. But once Moscow encountered its own bridge too far in Afghanistan, the grand and inexorable socialist retreat began.
Again, why this story is of crucial importance to us today is that while the superpower rivalry peaked in the early 1970s, a new grand historical arc began—that of the “world-historical relationship,” as Michael Vlahos calls it, between America and Islam.◈ Kissinger and Nixon were the giants present at that creation, and we have lived ever since with the rule sets then put in motion. If the rule set of NATO has historically been characterized as “keep the Americans in, keep the Germans down, and keep the Russians out,” then the American rule set for the Middle East over the past three decades could be described as “keep the Israelis strong, keep the House of Saud safe, and keep the fundamentalist radicals down.”
In 1967, the decades-long war between Israel and Islam began, slowly pulling the United States into the fray. Our involvement jumped dramatically with the 1973 war (Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”) and the simultaneous rise of OPEC’s willingness to use oil as a strategic economic weapon. From there it’s been all uphill: through the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Teheran embassy hostages and the failed Desert One rescue attempt, the bombing of the Marines barracks in Lebanon, the creation of Central Command, the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and America’s escorting of endangered tankers in the Gulf, right on to Desert Storm and our twelve-year war with Saddam that ended in 2003, only to be replaced by a long-term military occupation. It has been a stunning escalation over the decades, one that was almost completely obscured to the American public until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The grand historical arc of our relationship with Islam is clearly peaking with the Bush Administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime—and to rehabilitate Ba’athist Iraq, much as we did with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan following World War II. It is an understatement to say that the time for a clear enunciation of new rule sets is at hand. The strategy of preemption is one such rule set, but it obviously doesn’t go far enough to set in motion the sort of sweeping historical change envisioned by those who argued that removing Saddam would trigger a Big Bang of positive political-military developments across the region. Running this historical arc to ground over the coming years will be the great focus of U.S. foreign policy, and that will require the State Department to supplant the Defense Department as the guiding force in U.S. decision making, rule making, and deal brokering in the region. We need a Kissinger for the Middle East—not the Kissinger we actually had there in the mid-1970s but the Kissinger we sent to Moscow and Beijing in the early 1970s. We need a visionary who understands that we’ve already reached the mountaintop.
My concerns for U.S. national security strategy go far beyond peace in the Middle East, or even the Defense Department’s mistaken assumption that it can bring stability to that region simply by taking down enough “bad guys.” It is not enough for the Bush Administration to say that our new strategic focus is an “arc of instability” that stretches across the Muslim-dominated regions of North Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. America needs to understand the larger global conflict we join when we seek to transform Iraq from “rogue regime” to model Arab democracy. It is an enduring conflict between those who want to see disconnected societies like Saddam’s Iraq join the global community defined by globalization’s Functioning Core and others who will do whatever it takes in terms of violence to prevent these societies from being—in their minds—assimilated into a “sacrilegious global economic empire” lorded over by the United States. The most frightening form this violence takes in the current age is religious-inspired transnational terrorism, or what Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon dub “the age of sacred terror.”◈ Over the long run, the real danger we face in this era is more than just the attempts by terrorists to drive the United States out of the Middle East; rather, it is their increasingly desperate attempts to drive the Middle East out of the world.
Most experts will tell you that modern terrorism began in the late 1960s, roughly corresponding to the youthquake that rocked many advanced industrial societies at that time. From its origins in the late 1960s, politically inspired or ideologically driven terrorist groups slowly ramped up their attacks worldwide, in no small measure because of systematic support from the Soviet bloc. When that aid disappeared in the late 1980s, global terrorism nosedived, leading many experts (including me) to surmise it would no longer constitute a significant security threat for the international community as a whole.
What really happened in the 1990s is that many of these terrorist groups, cut off from Soviet material and ideological support, fundamentally reinvented themselves as religiously motivated terror movements. This is not to say that religious motivations weren’t present prior to the nineties—they were just sublimated to accommodate their Soviet sponsors. Worldwide, the number of casualties from terrorist acts skyrocketed starting in the mid-1990s, with almost a tripling of average annual casualties. The eight-year period 1987-1994 saw 9,575 global casualties from terrorism, but over the next nine years (1995-2003), the total jumped to 27,608.◈
If we date the origins of the historical arc of “sacred terror” somewhere in the early 1990s, then it’s clear that we as a country are still riding this learning curve upward at a dramatic rate. Compared with our progress along the extended learning curve we traveled on nuclear weapons, we’re not even out of the 1950s yet. Not surprisingly, our collective domestic responses to the dangers posed by catastrophic terrorism look an awful lot like the silly season of “duck and cover” from the atomic-crazed 1950s—only now it’s duct tape and plastic sheets for cover. I won’t even mention some of the wackiest ideas, like the military consulting with scriptwriters of Hollywood thrillers, or the Pentagon’s notion of setting up a betting parlor for predicting terrorist strikes.◈
Should we be embarrassed by our current fumbling toward enunciating robust rule sets to guide future responses? Absolutely not. We should do what we always do in
such situations: throw government money at the problem, enlist the aid of the private sector wherever possible, and inspire this country’s entrepreneurs, inventors, and grand strategists to fill in the rule-set gaps as quickly as possible.◈ But for now, keep one eye on the terrorist-threat index and one arm around your common sense. Reaching the summit of this historical arc will take time, but by my standards the Pentagon is showing all the right signs of taking this grand challenge as seriously as they took the nuclear age that preceded it. As a people Americans are easily spooked, but no enemy should ever bet against our boundless capacity for resourcefulness. We are a nation of MacGyvers.
This is not the first time a period of expansive globalization has pitted the advanced states against an ideological menace hell-bent on splitting the world in two. Globalization I generated its own frictions, many of which came together in the Bolshevik movement under Vladimir I. Lenin, another charismatic leader with a stomach for indiscriminate violence and great skill at leading a transnational terrorist network. Like Osama bin Laden, Lenin also dreamed of taking a vast swath of the planet offline, creating a kind of alternative universe where our rules didn’t apply, where our money found no purchase, and where our power had no reach. And like bin Laden, Lenin taught adherents that their “way of life” was endangered. His terrorist movement succeeded beyond our wildest fears, eventually enslaving roughly one-third of humanity in an isolating, politically repressed existence that yielded a frightening legacy of shorter life spans and widespread environmental devastation. There’s a reason most international adoptions today involve Western families importing babies from former socialist states.◈
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