Wishing for a Cold War

Yesterday, the Bush Administration released its National Security Strategy, a 54 page document outlining its basic foreign policy doctrine. As the Washington Post notes, the document is notable for its aggressive restatement of preemption as well as its commitment to ending global "tyranny", with language lifted directly from the second inaugural address.

The document itself is a study in wilfull blindness, seeming to ignore how much the political landscape has changed over the last five years and pressing ahead as if it were September 12, 2001. The reassertion of preemptive war ignores the fact that as a practical matter the Iraq occupation has made the use of military force in Iran or elsewhere a non-starter. The discussion of ending tyranny and promoting human rights, like the recently released State Department Human Rights Country Reports, has an ironic quality -- since it never mentions the U.S.'s own use of torture and systemic violation of the laws of war since 9/11.

But, the document seems most outdated in its continuing commitment to a vision of the world less and less plausible with each passing day. This vision imagines Islamic fundamentalism as a fairly unified and monolothic political movement, against which the U.S. must wage a global and permanet struggle, with the very survival of human freedom hanging in the balance. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly the same ideological framework as that used during the Cold War. In fact, Cold War references abound throughout the document, from Bush's claim to be part of the foreign policy tradition linking both Truman and Reagan to the fairly blunt assertion that, "The U.S. is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War."

This continual need to present current events as a latterday Cold War has an almost breathless desperation about it. To begin with, we face nothing like the threat posed by communism -- a clear ideology supported by a world power and presenting the possibility (although remote) that our government could fall. To the extent that we are in the early years of a long struggle, the struggle is ultimately the product of those in power, who sincerely (or insincerely) imagine any threat to physical safety requires a permanent global war.

More importantly, it tells us that the Administration, rather than confronting a new challenge, is ultimately reliving the past -- hoping that the symbols, rhetoric, and counterinsurgency tools of a previous era can be the building blocks for contemporary policy. It's no surprise that so many of the Administration's foreign policy wonks were Russia "experts," or like Rumsfeld old-time cold warriors.

The desire to recreate the past again speaks to a basic problem facing the Administration and its allies. The Cold War framework provides ideological legitimacy to the state's actions, and an easy basis by which to distinguish friend from foe. It also masks what is a remarkable fact --the folks in charge simply have no idea how to make sense of the post-Cold War world. This world, our lived reality, is one without ideological coherence or clear left/right divisions. In a sense, the National Security Strategy shows the Administration fumbling for a way out of the morass by both hoping no one has noticed that it isn't 9/11 anymore, or that the Cold War and Cold War-thinking are irrelevant.

In the end, what's most surprising about Bush and his advisors is how quaint they are. But then again, if they were to give up on all the outdated Cold War thinking, what ideas, policies, proposals would be left?