The New Cold War Paradigm

[andyfox]

A few weeks ago, I posted about "The New Cold War"; I should have said "The New Cold War Paradigm."

Here's an excerpt from the famous NSC68, written in 1950, which laid out the rationale for United States strategy during much of the Cold War:

"The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority. The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion for forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled form the Kremlin. The Kremlin is inescapably militant."

And here, an excerept from an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal last week:

"There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers. School textbooks tell young Iranians to be ready for a final global struggle against an evil enemy, named as the U.S., and to prepare themselves for the privileges of martyrdom."


I see a marked similarity in the language and outlook of both excerpts. Anyone else?

[BluffTHIS!]

That our country might have a similar view of those two disparate regimes is only significant if those views are false.

[andyfox]

The view we had of the Soviet Union was surely myopic. That led to false assumptions. For example, the author of NSC68, Paul Nitze, later conceded that intelligence estimates overstated Red Army readiness and thus Stalin's willingness to use it. By seeing only the Soviet influence in Stalin's foreign policy, and by ignoring the Russian component, we misunderstand the cohesiveness of different brands of communism.

Our myopia caused us to define our interests solely in terms of a worldwide Soviet threat. (NSC68 said that "a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.") It thus became very dificult for us to (1)distinguish between our vital interests and those that should have been secondary or peripheral; and (2) see any political movement that was anywhere to the left of where we wanted it to be as acceptable.

[bisonbison]

Paul Nitze, later conceded that intelligence estimates overstated Red Army readiness and thus Stalin's willingness to use it.

Saddam was the same story. The overestimation of force readiness inflates the leader's willingness and ability to bring that force to bear.

Overestimation has been the defensive stance of advisors since God invented the privy council.

[BluffTHIS!]

andy,

Although you quote from a 1950 document, you have used the cold war itself as a paradigm, which is not limited to that time. Soviet military readiness and the political will to use it were much greater later during the cold war. And it does not seem to me to be myopia to be preoccuppied with an enemy state who both has the capability to inflict serious damage on us or our allies, and also seeks to spread its oppressive political system, which Iran does as it wishes to see semi-dictatorial Islamic Shari'a regimes spread to more countries.


bison: cautious overestimation is more likely to preserve the national security than underestimation, as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 showed.

[bisonbison]

bison: cautious overestimation is more likely to preserve the national security than underestimation, as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 showed.

This doesn't really make sense. Cautious overestimation would still have gotten us blown out of the water at Pearl Harbor, and as the London plots have shown, cautious overestimation wasn't gonna stop a new round of plane attacks.

For a country with as many vital domestic assets as the US has, first strike defense is prohibitively expensive unless our military and law inforcement intelligence is very effective.

[canis582]

I am currently reading The decline and fall of the roman empire by Edward Gibbon.

The Romans had like 2 legions in England, 4 in the Mid East, a few in North Africa and and 16 in Germany.

To paraphrase a Roman historian: 'The Germans are so tough because they do not value their lives much when they aren't free.'

Right now, the oil in the middle east happens to be the greatest strategic prize in the history of mankind, so we've been subjegating them since 1918 (Britian and the US).

I think they are different, the Russians were a superpower that desired a large sphere of influence, the Iranians just want to be free from the US's sphere of influence. (ie no S [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]hah)

[PokrLikeItsProse]

In the past, some asserted a monolithic international communism.

In the present, some assert a monolithic Islamic ideology.

Both are incorrect assertions.

[nicky g]

[ QUOTE ]
In the past, some asserted a monolithic international communism.

In the present, some assert a monolithic Islamic ideology.

Both are incorrect assertions.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed.

A key problem with US foreign policy was that it often viewed, or at least treated, essentially nationalist (in the sense of wanting to minimise all forms of foreign inteference in the running of their countries) movements and regimes with communist ones. In doing so it frequently undermined largely peace-oriented and democratic governments and saw them replaced with brutal right-wing dictatorships or bloody wars, civil or otherwise. Ironically its behaviour over and over again drove such regimes into the hands of the Soviets, whom they wound up as seeing as the lesser of two evils but if left alone would have had little interest in.

The same sort of thing seems to be in danger of being repeated now.

[andyfox]

"Soviet military readiness and the political will to use it were much greater later during the cold war."

Maybe. But so was our willingness to exaggerate it, witness John Kennedy's rising to the presidency on the wings of a non-existent "missile gap," and Ronald Reagan's claims for twenty-five years that we were losing the Cold War and that Armageddon was fast approaching.

That Iran wishes to see regimes to its liking spread to other countries is important. Accurately assessing what it is doing to bring this about is also important. Ignoring other causes of bad things in the world, as we often did during the Cold War, can lead to tragedy.