The successful democratization of Germany and Japan under U.S. occupation created a fatally alluring image of liberation by force that was to be trotted out later from Vietnam to Iraq. The historical, economic, geographical, cultural, and social positions and experiences of these countries bore no relation whatsoever to those of Germany and Japan, but no matter. The image of the U.S. soldier as conqueror, liberator, and modernizer rolled into one was already firmly established during the Spanish-American War and World War I, and drew on still older roots.21
As a result of a combination of old American myths and developments in the mid-twentieth century, this image achieved a power in the American mind that survived what should have been the shattering counterlesson of Vietnam, and which has offset to some extent fears of imperial involvements and military quagmires. The role of America as “guardian of freedom” was played on incessantly by official propaganda, political rhetoric, the media, and indeed much of American society. It achieved its most eloquent expression in the speeches of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan—the first a Democrat, the second a Republican, but in this regard not easily distinguishable.
This image was used continuously by Bush and other officials after 9/11, and was of tremendous importance in the mobilization of support for the Iraq War. Even in the case of Afghanistan, the simple and justifiable arguments for war in self-defense against Al Qaeda were accompanied by surreal statements about turning that country into a “beachhead of democracy and progress in the Muslim world” (in the words of a U.S. senator at a conference I attended in 2002). As the aftermath of the Taliban’s defeat has amply demonstrated, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to Afghan reality, and displayed a complete ignorance of modern Afghan history, society, and culture.22
But if the cold war strengthened the messianic aspects of the American Creed, then it poured new sustenance into the maw of America’s demons and the “paranoid style” of American politics: an obsession with domestic subversion, a belief in an outside world dominated by enemies and potential traitors, a reliance on military force, and a contempt for many of America’s leading allies. The cold war also strengthened messianic nationalism, expressed not only in the quasi-religious terms of adherence to the creed, but in the explicitly religious ones of belief in America as a nation chosen by God to lead the struggle against the enemies of God. These of course included “Godless Communism” and any forces associated with it, but by extension meant any enemies of America.
Coming right after the war against the Nazis, the cold war thus strengthened and indeed institutionalized the Manichean elements in the American view of the outside world, a belief in absolute powers of light led by America fighting against absolute forces of darkness. The struggle against a revolutionary and conspiratorial enemy also attracted a certain personality type on the U.S. side, people who saw themselves as a kind of anti-Communist revolutionary elite dedicated to fighting the Communist: self-described “Bolsheviks of the Right” like David Stockman, or the curious figure of Grover Norquist, a radical Rightist who reportedly admires Lenin’s “iron dedication” and keeps his portrait in his living room—not behavior characteristic of your traditional conservative.23
This Manichaean tendency in the American right-wing and nationalist intellectual world at the start of the twenty-first century was perfectly summed up in a passage about the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 2003 by a horrified British observer, Mark Almond:
Acting as the ideological enforcers of the Bush administration, the American Enterprise Institute is a kind of Cominform of the new world order. Its so-called scholars are the inquisitors of a global regime. Minutes of their foreign seminars are more like sitting in on a hate session from China’s cultural revolution than a political science class at Yale. Participants rise to denounce the hate figure of the day or to endorse a visiting dignitary favored by the regime. There is an overwhelming stench of ideological conformity. Washington think-tanks promote not pluralism, but a Stalinist-style dogmatism with eulogized conformists and excommunicated heretics. This show-trial mentality is hardly surprising, as the American Enterprise Institute brings the ideological successors of McCarthy and renegade leftists together with émigrés educated in the Soviet bloc.24
This portrait is still true of the AEI in 2012. The extraordinary rigidity, narrowness, and authoritarianism of that institution was demonstrated in March 2010 when they dismissed David Frum, the neoconservative speechwriter allegedly responsible for Bush’s “axis of evil” phrase. He was sacked for daring to criticize the Republican position on health care reform and warn the party against the closeness of its links to Fox News and figures like Rush Limbaugh. Frum’s sacking followed a bitter attack on him by the Wall Street Journal. He was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that AEI staffers “had been ordered not to speak to the media” about health care “because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do…The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line.”25
The cold war both contributed to and legitimated the drives to hysterical hatred in radical conservative circles. In part precisely because these roots are so deep, this tendency outlived the disappearance of Communism in the early 1990s and was then directed both against new enemies abroad and “liberals” at home. These were people for whom the cold war atmosphere had become an addiction, irrespective of any intellectually serious analysis of real threats. Or as Irving Kristol wrote in 1993, “there is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me. So far from having ended, my Cold War has increased in intensity, as sector after sector has been corrupted by the liberal ethos. Now that the other ‘Cold War’ is over, the real Cold War has begun. We are far less prepared for this Cold War, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat.”26
Domestic threats preoccupied the American radical Right for much of the cold war, often strangely eclipsing the Soviet Union as a menace in their minds.27 This redirection of an ostensibly national struggle toward attacks on domestic enemies is also a much older and wider pattern in nationalism. As Alfred Cobban remarks of the French nationalists before 1914, “Though the nationalists of the early years of the 20th Century often used bellicose language and were xenophobic, their aggression was directed more against their compatriots than against foreigners.”28
As Kristol’s statement suggests, wars are always morally corrupting, and the cold war after all went on for a very long time compared to most “hot” wars. They are corrupting no less in their idealization of their own side than in their demonization of the enemy, and as noted, in their deliberate and systematic cultivation of hatred, including toward rival compatriots guilty of alleged weakness or treason in the face of the enemy. This has been a staple of American right-wing attacks on liberals throughout the cold war and post–cold war periods, taken to lunatic heights in works such as Ann Coulter’s Treason, and the broadcasts of Glenn Beck.29 It is important to note though that this is not the work of an impotent lunatic fringe, but of very powerful forces within the Republican Party. One of the most extreme books attacking Obama, by Pam Geller, has a foreword by Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.30
Wars are also corrupting in their encouragement of the belief that “the truth has to be protected by a bodyguard of lies,” in Churchill’s phrase: that public lying is morally and patriotically justified for the higher good of victory, and that enemy propaganda is to be met not with the truth, but with counterpropaganda. Conscious or unconscious falsification of facts and evidence has become a staple of much of the discussion of international affairs in the United States—as demonstrated, for example, in the 2003 media campaign against France. This is the spirit in which publicly funded institutions like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were founded and have continued, even after the end of the cold war.
The cold war allowed institutions like the upper class Public Affairs Luncheon Club of Dallas in the 1960s to weave differen
t paranoias into one seamless web, with speeches on themes like, “the UN is the springboard from which the great Communist movements are coming”; “international socialists still control the State Department”; and “the internationalists have all but destroyed U.S. national independence.”31 The fear of Communism taking over a defeatist United States seems strongly to have affected even so apparently sober a bureaucratic figure as Dick Cheney.32 Far from the end of the cold war liberating the United States from this malign discourse, the victory of 1989–1991 sealed it in place. All of these tendencies continued (albeit at a diminished level) during the 1990s, and gained a new and frightening strength after 9/11. Fears of Sharia law taking over the United States with the help of a covertly Muslim U.S. president are even crazier than their cold war predecessors, but stand in the same tradition. The content of some of the conspiracy theories concerning President Obama is directly linked to cold war paranoias. Aaron Klein’s The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists is probably the most lurid example of this approach.33
Permanent Mobilization
The cold war therefore perpetuated and intensified already existing tendencies in American political culture. Coming on top of World War II, however, it also introduced something quite new: a state system of permanent semi-mobilization for war, institutionalized in the military–industrial–academic complex and the academic bodies linked to it. As the radical U.S. critic and historian C. Wright Mills wrote in 1959:
For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an “emergency” without a foreseeable end…the American elite does not have any real image of peace—other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for “peace” is the fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.34
In typical fashion for security elites of this kind, they became deeply conditioned over the decades to see themselves not just as tougher, braver, wiser, and more knowledgeable than their ignorant, innocent compatriots, but as the only force standing between their country and destruction. They are therefore entitled if necessary to deceive their compatriots for their own good, because, after all—so the wisdom goes—if the American people had been left to their own instincts, America would have been left almost defenseless in the face of German and Japanese aggression in the 1940s and Soviet aggression at the start of the cold war. And, be it said, there are historical grounds for a limited and prudent form of this attitude. General George Marshall—not a man given to hysterical exaggeration—described the reduction of the armed forces after 1945 as “not demobilization, but a rout.”35
This “emergency without end” has now been repeated in an intensified form in the “war against terrorism,” but the nature of the security establishment and military–industrial–academic complex created by the cold war also left the United States poorly equipped to fight against terrorists. Instead, this complex of institutions and attitudes requires states as enemies—and if such enemies are not readily apparent, it will instinctively seek to conjure them up, at least in the American public mind.36
As military spending and the military–industrial sector grew during World War II and the cold war—with space exploration as a minor adjunct—they have become fundamental to the U.S. economy, U.S. economic growth, and above all U.S. technological development. Despite its often almost incredible wastefulness and corruption, it must be admitted that this was also in some ways a kind of unacknowledged but rather successful state industrial development strategy, in a country whose free market ideology meant that it could not formally adopt or admit to such a strategy.
The growing importance of the military and associated institutions and interests was quite unlike anything that had ever existed before in U.S. history. Hostility to standing armies—involving both high taxes and the threat of royal tyranny—was a central part of the motivation for the American revolt against Britain. This sentiment helped fuel the belief in popular militias as a free and democratic alternative—which, as written into the Second Amendment to the Constitution, constitutes today the main constitutional defense of the right to bear arms and the U.S. gun lobby, and has been adopted as one of the ideological planks by the Tea Parties.37 Three times before the cold war, the United States resorted to conscription in order to fight wars—in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II—but each time, victory was followed by very rapid demobilization. Only with the cold war did the notion of permanent readiness for war become an integral part of the American system. This was doubtless unavoidable, given the permanent (if often exaggerated) nature of the threat from a permanently mobilized and nuclear-armed Soviet Union; but just because it was unavoidable does not make its consequences any less dangerous.
While new to the United States, this kind of system and atmosphere have been all too widespread in world history. In the decades before 1914, all the major European powers, with the partial exception of Britain, lived in this state of permanent semimobilization. This reflected the objective security circumstances of the European continent at the time; but as in the United States during the cold war, it also first created and was then itself fed by great military, bureaucratic, and industrial blocs with a strong vested interest in the maintenance of a mood of national paranoia, fear and hatred of other countries, and international tension. A classic example is the German Navy League, backed by the great steel and armaments interests, allied to the old military aristocracy, and dedicated to the creation of an arms race with Britain.38 Such groups contributed a good deal to the competing aggressive nationalisms that eventually clashed between 1914 and 1918.
Every country had its version of the “Committee on the Present Danger,” which mobilized fear of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Every European country before 1914 had its own repeated and carefully stoked panics concerning the enemy’s military capabilities, like the “missile gap” scare that the Democrats created as a weapon against Eisenhower with the help of intellectual allies like Edward Teller.39
In the United States, one of the first employers of this tactic was Senator Lyndon Johnson as chairman of the “Preparedness Subcommittee” of the Senate during the Korean War, and since then it has become a fixed and recurring feature of American political theatre.40 Such moves can be used either by the opposition to discredit the government in power, or by the government to whip up patriotic support and discredit the opposition. Lord Salisbury, several times British premier at the height of the British Empire, once remarked sourly that if British generals and their political allies had their way, he would have to pay to “fortify the Moon against an attack from Mars.”41
Indeed, in 1897, a British magazine published a story with a title that could have been written by Charles Krauthammer—“How Britain Fought the World in 1899”—in which France and Russia invade Britain. In the words of its publisher, this story was “no wild dream of the imaginative novelist, this threat of an invasion of our beloved shore. It is solidly discussed in French and Russian, aye and in German newspapers…The Frenchman and the educated Russian talk of such a thing as coolly as we talk of sending out a punitive expedition to the Soudan or up to the hills of North-West India.”
This bizarre fantasy was praised as realistic by senior British officers, and was part of a very extensive genre of such stories in Europe at the time.42 In the United States, such fictional “scares” concerning invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and even Nicaragua became a staple of thrillers during the cold war, recalling nineteenth-century Protestant fears of a Catholic army invading America by balloon.43 More and more American novels are now being produced on the subject of future war with China—invariably, of course, brought about by Chinese aggression.44
These old cultural and historical roots of American paranoia helped anti–Communist hysteria
become part of American political culture—a matter of assumptions and fears that exist and operate below the level of political discussion, and which are not indeed really open to rational argument.45 Such wild fantasies did not just appear in fictional works, but in those of highly influential and respected officials and commentators. In his book The Present Danger, of 1980, neoconservative Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization” of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power, and asked if a point had come at which “surrender or war are the only choices.”46
After what became obvious about the real condition of the Soviet economy and military at that time, one would have thought that Podhoretz and his colleagues would have become at least somewhat chastened and modest in their judgments, or that their public would have lost confidence in that judgment. But no. Long after the Soviet collapse, Podhoretz was still there, editor in chief of Commentary, a regular pundit on television, now warning of the Muslim threat to the United States and advising on “how to win World War IV.”47
Bismarck on occasions used such scares as a tactic in his struggle to control the German parliament, co-opt or emasculate the liberal parties, and maintain royal control over the executive. Under his successors, it became a repeated practice.48 In the United States, such scares concerning Soviet power continued even as the Soviet Union was manifestly collapsing, and were then immediately revived in the form of paranoia about Russian “revanche,” even as the Russian armed forces were similarly rotting before our eyes.49
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