Tuesday, September 10, 2002

The Cold War is over, and with the end of the Evil Empire, the US government, taking globalization to heart, has settled on a new enemy-- a vast, international "axis of evil". If I weren't an acknowledged skeptic, it might be fair for me to suggest that the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda reads like bad conspiracy theory. So the Cold War didn't last long enough to guarantee permanent American righteousness in all international interventions? So we need a new reason to explain propping up various corporations and oil or steel interests? So we need an enemy that the American people can feel-- someone they can hate without thinking-- because foreign policy a la 20th century is about the propagation of "gut feelings", and the US government goes to war if it feels bad.

All this intervention creates its own vicious circles; all this military aid arms those who might one day be our enemies; all this intuition does little to assist our attempts at rational evaluation of international politics. I like the title of an article in the Washington Post Magazine by Bob Thompson-- "Doomsday Revisited: If the Cold War is really history, then what are all those missiles pointed at?" Where is that peace dividend? The current regime doesn't even bother to promise us victory or peace anymore-- the Cold War was our intellectual training class for this new holy war on "evil". We are fighting for some vague idea of national security and safety, yet forgetting the primal lesson that our most base fears might teach us, namely, that fear conditions threat perception to an extent that is often unrealistic. Fear is emotional, thus should not be so readily used as an instructive guide to policy.