On the merits of a new cold war with the arab world
I remember the cold war fondly. As a kid, I never thought that we were all going to be blown up. I never thought that Russians were evil or that we were even at war with “The Soviet Union.” I thought we despised a very small cabal of Soviet leadership and while we couldn’t ameliorate the situations, we weren’t going to play a part abetting their injustice. In the 1950s we drew lines and said, “Try your system on that side of the line and we’ll try ours on this side and see who makes out better.” By 1971 when I first started to be aware of the system, it was a cooled off cold war that felt for all the world like peace and prosperity to me.
Similarly, I don’t think we have a grudge against Tunisia. I think that a small cabal of dunderheads in the Arab world find that it is politically expedient for them to set us up as the boogie man, and I don’t see the point in playing along with that.
The President says that we can’t afford to withdraw from the Arab world. I wonder if that is true though. Have we really thought about it? Have we game planned out a new cold war against Islamic extremists? If we haven’t we should.
A cold war must be based on MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. That each side had thousands of nuclear warheads that could destroy the planet 10 times over is what kept the peace. I am not sure if we want Islamic extremists who live for the end of the world to possess enough WMD to enforce MAD.
The Soviets, for all that they were, were not extremists longing for the end of the world.
“As a kid, I never thought that we were all going to be blown up.”
We were sheltered: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/start.html?pg=11
When I look at the reaction to this movie, I am reluctantly left with the stubborn thought “They really do hate us for our freedoms.”
But unfortunately, when it looks at the embassy attacks, the Christian Right fails to see its own image.
@jason: As a kid, I never thought that we were all going to be blown up.
I had just the opposite experience. In rural Virginia schools we were constantly told that the Russian children were going to school seven days a week (because they were Godless and did not go to church) and taking all physics courses so that they could build better bombs to kill us all, which is why we had to get under our desks for the civil defense drills.
@DD A cold war must be based on MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.
MAD did not come in until the mid-1960s after the ABM Treaty. Before that, both sides were, at least in theory, committed to trying to defend against and survive through an enemy attack. That’s why the Star Wars program was seen by the Soviets as so de-stabilizing.
Overall: I think we have been, as a civilization, in a cold war with Islam since the failure of the last siege of Vienna in the 1500s. What’s going on now is all the little flare-ups like Vietnam, Indonesia, Angola, that marked the US-Soviet cold war.
Isn’t the metaphor you’re looking for more like an “Iron Curtain”?
Right Steve that is the better metaphor. Ultimately it was the Hungarians, Poles, and East Germans who undid Soviet communism from the inside out. Similarly, it is going to have to be the Tunisians, Egyptians and Sudanese that toss out the Muslim Nrotherhood.
But in the Iron Curtain scenario brought forward and played out with the Muslim/non-Muslim world today there two fundamental questions you’d have to ask:
1. Is there going to be a reconquista of Western Europe, or does that get written off as fairly radicalized Muslim territory? The rise of Europe as a continent of nation states pretty closely coincides with the Spanish reconquista, the military defeat of the Ottomans outside Vienna, and the drawing of a hard line around Europe to insulate it from the Muslims. Most of what is available today to be known of the Muslims who choose to immigrate to Britain, France, the Benelux, Germany, and Scandinavia is that they are further down the scale toward radicalism than many of the Muslims who stayed at home. So if the US did embark on such a strategy, where would the “curtain” fall?
2. Who becomes the intermediary between the Muslim and non-Muslim world in this scenario? Throughout the high middle ages and the Renaissance the intermediaries who handled the still-necessary trade between the Ottomans and Europe were the Jews. Jewish merchants moved back and forth between both cultures; families and businesses often had branches and/or connections between Trieste and Damascus, Venice and Aleppo. As with the US and USSR, there had to be ways to communicate and trade even during the most frigid periods of the Cold War. Who performs that function in a new “Iron Curtain” scenario?
Don’t misunderstand: I’m asking these questions because I hope there are answers, because this scenario has a lot of long-term appeal to me.
Steve, I think you are being a little too literal. The kind of cold war I’d favor would entail real economic, political and cultural isolation of countries that fail to buy into some basic religious toleration and human rights.
That would mean; cutting ourselves off from cheap Saudi crude and other trade, not accepting student visas, etc.
No I get your point, but I think Europe may well have become a region between. . . .