The Cold War Versus the Current Era

Republicans are moaning about how difficult things are these days. This is curious. The Bush Administration went around in circles for five years huffing and puffing on North Korea and essentially came back to the policy that existed at the end of Clinton's presidency. After 9/11, we had to deal with Afghanistan and that would have kept the Bush Administration plenty busy, but they chose to give us a war in Iraq that we didn't need. It isn't just foreign policy that is difficult for Bush; he botched the response to Hurricane Katrina and then claimed he needed a law that allowed him to call in the military which was nonsense since the real problem was an underwhelming use of the resources he had.

Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly links to a story by Paul Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times who punctures the new mythology:

IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a "less complex time" and saying he was "almost nostalgic" for its return.

(snip)

The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it's true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other's biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.

Kennedy debunks the 'easy' days of the Cold War and properly so. On several blogs, including Donkey Path, there have been posts reminding us how disastrous it would have been, as just one example, to have had a president like George W. Bush handling something as 'predictable' as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don't want to minimize what's going on these days. Things are changing and we have an ideological administration with its head stuck on old ideas about the world; and some Republicans (Wolfowitz as an example) are even shocked that people in the third world aren't behaving like stereotypical natives in old Hollywood movies. In some respects, Bush has been handling the wrong problems while ignoring a wide range of issues, including genocide, human rights, labor rights, Global Warming and the need to deal with energy issues on a much broader basis. And certainly things are going on in parts of the world we don't know very well, but part of the problem is that there are too many people in our current administration (and Congress, for that matter) who don't want to know what's going on in the world, let alone learn, for example, what the difference is between Sunnis and Shiites. In the end, the problem is that the American people elected an incompetent marketing executive for president and a paranoid lever puller for vice president. We need competent people in this era who are driven more by pragmatism than ideology. We stayed out of trouble during the Cold War because by and large we did have competent people.