And Now This: Lessons from the Old Era for the New One by John Lewis Gaddis
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-The post cold war era began with the collapse
of the Berlin Wall and ended with the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin
towers
·
-Would anyone claim in the aftermath of Sept 11
that the US can continue the policies it was following with respect to its
national defense or toward the world before Sept 11?
·
-We need a reconsideration of how the US has
managed its responsibilities in the decade since the Cold War for the purpose
of determining where we go from here
·
-The geographical position and the military
power of the US are no longer sufficient to ensure its security
·
-The 20th century eroded that sense
of safety as a result of a larger role the US had assigned itself in world affairs,
together with ominous shifts in the European balance of power
·
-The cold war made the American homeland seem
less secure in two ways: when spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union were
shown to have betrayed the country; and as the prospect arose that Soviet
long-range bombers and later intercontinental ballistic missiles might soon be
capable of reaching American soil
·
-The very term “national security” invented
during WWII and put to such frequent use during the cold war always implied
that both threats and vulnerabilities lay outside the country
·
-Americans have entered a new stage in their
history in which they can no longer take security for granted
·
-Given the opportunity to rerun the sequence,
what would we want to change, and what would we want to keep the same?
Unilateralism:
o
American ideas, institutions, and culture
remained as attractive as ever throughout much of the world, but American
policies began to come across as overbearing, self-indulgent, and insensitive
to the interests of others
o
We neglected the cultivation of great power
relationships. We seemed to have assumed that we no longer needed the
cooperation of others to promote our interests
o
We failed to sustain creating a situation in
which our adversaries feared one another more than they feared us
§
This happened chiefly as a result of a third
characteristic of our post-cold war foreign policy, which was a preference for
justice at the expense of order
o
A fourth aspect of our post-cold war foreign
policy was the inconsistency with which we pursued regional justice
§
By applying universal principles on a less than
universal basis, Washington opened itself to the charge of hypocrisy (Somalia,
Rwanda)
§
Meanwhile in the Middle East, we tolerated the
continuing Israeli dispossession of Palestinians even as we were seeking to
secure the rights of Palestinians;
§
We did nothing to adjust policy in response to the
fact that Iran was moving toward free elections and a parliamentary system even
as old allies like Saudi Arabia were shunning such innovations
§
There was, in short, a gap between our
principles and our practices
o
A fifth problem was our tendency to regard our
economic system as a model to be applied throughout the rest of the world
without regard to differences in local conditions and with little sense of the
effects it would have in generating inequality
§
Capitalism would have expanded after the cold
war regardless of what the US did
§
By linking that expansion with our foreign
policy objectives, we associated ourselves with something abroad that we would
never tolerate at home: an unregulated market devoid of a social safety net
·
-The US
emphasized the advantages while neglecting the dangers of globalization
o
It was made to be a good thing that capital,
commodities, ideas and people could move freely across boundaries
o
There was little talk that danger might move
across just as freely
o
That’s the major lesson of Sept 11: the very
instruments of the new world order- airplanes, liberal policies on immigration,
and money transfers, multiculturalism itself- can be turned horribly against it
·
-What connects these shortcomings is a failure of
strategic vision: the ability to see how the parts of one’s policy combine to
form the whole
· -Conclusion: our power exceeded our wisdom
·
-What must we do differently?
o
Maintain coalitions which will require
tolerating diversity within it
o
If global coalition against terrorism is to
survive, it will demand even greater flexibility on the part of Americans than
our cold war coalition did; we must relinquish the unilateralism we indulged in
during the post-cold war period
o
We must define our allies more in terms of
shared interests and less in terms of shared values
o
We must compromise more than we would like in
promoting human rights, open markets, and the spread of democracy
o
We must concentrate more on getting whatever
help we can in the war against terrorism wherever we can find it; our concerns
with regional justice may suffer as a result
o
We must address the grievances that fuel
terrorism in the first place
·
-The era we have just entered is bound to be more
painful than the one we’ve just left
·
-The anti-terrorist coalition is sure to undergo
strains as its priorities shift from recovery to retaliation
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