AFTER THE COLD WAR

Samuel Francis

I was more or less conscripted into speaking on the topic "After the Cold War," and there is perhaps some unconscious irony in that subject, because if you think about American foreign policy in the 1990s, you would not know at first glance that that period is after the Cold War. What is remarkable about this period is that both political parties and almost all commentators on foreign policy always start off their speeches or articles by performing an obligatory knee bend to the end of the Cold War and then continue to talk about our foreign policy as though the Cold War were still going on.

We still chatter about "America's global responsibilities," we still worry about the scale of U.S. military defenses, we still dither and dabble in world affairs, perhaps even more recklessly than we did in the 1950s and 1960s. Occasionally, we stop to realize that our major adversary in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, no longer exists, but to this very day we have not even begun to think, let alone act, on the vast implications of the Soviet collapse. We still dole out immense sums of money in foreign aid to various client states; we still maintain the cold war alliances with Asian and Latin American states that were set up as a global defense system and in NATO we have even expanded the alliance to undertake a still undefined new mission. Most of all, we still conduct our foreign policy on the unquestioned assumption that the United States faces a serious threat to its vital interests and national security, even though noone seems to be able to tell us precisely what that threat is.

Indeed, American foreign policy in the post-Cold War period could perhaps be defined as a Search for a New Enemy, since only the existence of an enemy could justify the continuation of the basic framework of Cold War foreign policy. In fact, the end of the Cold War represents a new era in American foreign policy of the kind that we have not seen since at least the early 1930s and perhaps not since before 1914. All during that era, our foreign policy was exclusively defined by the need to defend the United States against a real or perceived enemy -- the Kaiser, the Axis, or the Kremlin. As a result, most of us, especially those whose profession is foreign policy, have simply lost the capacity to think of foreign policy in the absence of an enemy, and just as Voltaire said of God, that if He did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him, so may we -- or at least our foreign policy elite -- say that if an enemy does not exist, it is necessary to invent one. It is necessary for two reasons.

In the first place, it is almost impossible today for American professionals in foreign policy, national security, and related fields to think of a foreign policy that does not revolve around an enemy, and secondly, those same professionals possess a powerful vested interest in identifying an enemy and telling us how we ought to defeat or contain him. If they do not get paid for doing that, then they have no other function, and as I think back on my colleagues in Cold War, Inc., some years ago, I know that many of them have had to undertake some fancy footwork to adjust their professional lives to a Cold War-less world. They do not want to believe that the Cold War is over, they find it difficult to imagine that it is over, and they have a strong material interest in making sure that if indeed it is over we nevertheless need to be involved in a new one.

There have been a number of candidates for the new enemy -- Saddam Hussein is the most obvious, but even he is too much of a small fry to be credible, and despite his longevity in power, the pounding we gave him in the Gulf War makes him unsuitable. There are several other candidates -- Somalia's warlord Faria Aidid was characterized in virtually the same terms as Saddam when we suddenly found ourselves involved in Somalia, and more recently various Balkan or Arab leaders have popped up on the screen much like the cut-outs of 1930s gangsters that the FBI still uses for target practice at its training academy. Clearly, the basic personality of the Enemy is always Hitler, and he always exhibits the same demonic cruelty, the same maniacal aggressiveness, and the same psychotic ambitions as Der Fuehrer.

This tendency to cast current adversaries in the character of the last enemy is not new. In graduate school, writing a dissertation on English diplomacy in the age of Louis XIV, I realized how in British history, every foreign adversary is always depicted as the reincarnation of the last adversary. Louis XIV was conceived in much the same way as Philip II a century before. Napoleon bore a striking resemblance to Louis; the Kaiser to Napoleon, and Hitler to the Kaiser.

But sometimes today the enemy is cast not as a personality but as a force -- Islamic fundamentalism or transnational crime, which is usually lumped together with international terrorism, and all of which are then identified with domestic white separatists and militia groups. Islamic fundamentalism seemed for a while to be a very credible enemy, especially after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, but it soon faded after the Oklahoma City bombing. Transnational organized crime is perhaps a more plausible enemy, although it too lacks a conveniently defined face. Drug smuggling, arms smuggling, and people who smoke cigarettes on international air flights seem to compete for the role of the foe against whom our military, political, economic, and intelligence resources must be mobilized. A few years ago, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was quite explicit in identifying transnational crime as the new enemy. "The overall international organized crime threat to our interests is more serious than we had assumed," Sen. Kerry trembled. "Organized crime is the new communism, the new monolithic threat." All that is lacking is a large photograph of the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

The great advantage that transnational crime offers as the new enemy is that serves the interests of the army of professionals in foreign policy, who quickly doctor their resumes to present themselves as experts in criminology, and that it preserves the illusion of an enemy that is tangible and over which victory is conceivable if always conveniently just over the horizon.

But the problem with all these new enemies is the same: They simply are not comparable to either the Nazis or the Communists, or even the Kaiser. I disagree with some of my libertarian friends who never believed that the Soviet Union really was our enemy. I believe that Soviet power was directed ultimately at the conquest of the world and the destruction of the United States. In the post-Cold War era, that belief seems to have been justified by new research based on newly opened Soviet archives, and the "Cold War revisionists" who argued in the Vietnam era that Soviet expansionism was mainly directed toward defending Russian borders has now been largely discarded, even by the revisionists themselves. The libertarians argue that the fake Soviet enemy was invented for the purpose of justifying the vast enlargement of the federal state in the wake of World War II and for the perpetuation of the state machinery established during the earlier conflict. But even if their premise, that the Soviets were really not an enemy, is wrong, their conclusion contains a great deal of truth.

The recognition by the American foreign policy establishment in the 1940s that the Soviets were a threat, as belated as it was and as blinded as the establishment had been by its reliance on the counsel of outright traitors like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Lauchlin Curry, was followed by a resolution to fight communism in the same way as New Deal liberals had tried to fight domestic social problems. In announcing the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Truman announced that "The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died," and in 1965 Lyndon Johnson boasted of his plans to construct what he called "the TVA on the Mekong" that presumably would liberate the Vietnamese peasants from communism in the same way that the TVA was supposed to liberate Tennessee peasants like me from bootlegging and snake-charming. The strategy by which Cold War liberals sought to fight communism, then, was simply an extension of their strategy for domestic social reform, and it was a strategy that promised much the same rewards for the bureaucratic and managerial elites that were to supervise it.

The insight of James Burnham, in his trilogy on communism in the 1940s, that communism simply used "bad social conditions" much as it used any problem to advance its own power was missed by those establishment leaders who were otherwise influenced by Burnham. They followed him in exploiting his premise that the Soviets were engaged in a "struggle for the world," but they merely used that premise to construct and perpetuate a foreign policy apparatus -- in the Defense Department, the State Department, the CIA, and a whole range of alphabet soup agencies that was committed, more than to anything else, to preserving and enhancing its own bureaucratic leverage and to making certain that the struggle for the world would last forever, or at least until they started receiving their own pensions from the federal government. In the 1990s conservatives crow about our "victory in the Cold War," but virtually nothing we did during the Cold War deserves the name of victory. We armed our enemies with trade deals and grain deals even as we sent American troops to fight against the war machine that American capitalism helped build. We betrayed ally after ally to communism or its surrogates -- in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Africa, and Southeast Asia; we refused to extirpate the spies and traitors who infested the federal government and damned the characters of patriots and heroes like Whittaker Chambers and Louis Budenz who risked their careers and even their lives to expose the treason.

Our politicians in both parties used "Great Power Diplomacy" and arms treaties that could not be verified to advance their own careers, and even those who had spent their early lives fighting communism proved that they never understood it or its real goals. Historian Hugh Thomas in his history of the early years of the Cold War recounts how Harry Truman was perplexed after meeting Joseph Stalin. Whenever Truman unbosomed one of his diplomatic bromides, such as "Marshal Stalin, we are all working for world peace," Stalin would respond, "God will it." This confused Truman, who had been told that communists don't believe in God, so how could Stain invoke Him? Perhaps it would have been easier for Truman to understand if Stalin had met the president's platitudes with the response, "God damn it."

My point is that, yes, there was a real enemy in the Soviet Union and the communism it espoused, but no, we never did much to win victory over it, and even in the Reagan era, I can tell you, as one who worked on anti-communist foreign policy issues in the U.S. Senate, neither I nor any of my colleagues believed in the 1980s that "we" were winning the Cold War or defeating communism. What we saw -- every day -- was a betrayal of what Reagan had committed himself to and a refusal to follow through on policies in arms control, aid to foreign anti-communist forces, counter-terrorism, and intelligence policy that had been promised. For all the conservative grousing about "535 secretaries of state" and "congressional micro-management of foreign policy," I can tell you that I and other conservative aides in the Congress engaged in micro-management of foreign policy every day in an effort to make our policies as anti-communist as they were. If there is a real hero of the "victory over Communism," it is not Ronald Reagan but men like Jesse Helms who perpetually held the president's and the administration's feet to the fire. It is simply an accident of history that the Soviet Union collapsed when it did, and its collapse had virtually nothing to do with any policy that the Reagan administration followed.

Having won a victory we did not deserve, we now devote ourselves to continuing to fight the war. Last year I spoke to this group on the subject of imperialism, and I frankly described our recent policies of foreign interventionism as a form of imperialism. It is that, but it is also something different, namely globalism.

Globalism differs from imperialism in that under imperialism, one nation or political unit conquers other political units; while under globalism, there is a transcendence of the political unit itself. We see this today in the erosion of and the deliberate attack upon national sovereignty, in treaties like NAFTA, the WTO, and the European Union; in the efforts at the enhancement of the United Nations toward a world government, replicating virtually every function of national government -- proposals for a standing UN army, for a new international currency, for direct UN taxation, and for a permanent UN criminal court to try "human rights" violations, as well as in various UN covenants that seek to regulate domestic subnational laws and policies on such social and cultural issues as the treatment of women and children, regulation of the environment, civil and political rights, infliction of the death penalty, and most recently even global gun control. The identification of transnational crime as the new enemy fits into globalism well, since it involves transnational law enforcement and the supersession of domestic law enforcement and indeed of domestic law itself.

The driving force behind globalism, again unlike imperialism, is not the ruling class of any distinct nation but rather a new ruling class that is transnational in its scope and interests, an elite that has effectively disengaged itself from the underlying institutions and cultures that define nationality, so that today a corporate executive in New York has more in common with his counterpart in Tokyo or Kiev than he does with his co-national in Kansas or Wisconsin. A number of social critics, not all of them terribly critical, have pointed to this phenomenon, including Zbigniew Brzezinski and the late Christopher Lasch. Pat Buchanan's new book, The Great Betrayal, offers quotation after quotation from American corporate leaders who disavow the interests of their own country and explicitly identify themselves and their companies as non-American. We see the results of this disengagement in the recent controversy over importing foreign skilled workers. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of Americans who are perfectly well qualified to work as computer engineers but who cannot get jobs in the computer industry because the companies, run by deracinated and avaricious geeks who have lost all sense of national identity, insist on hiring Third World workers at lower salaries.

And of course we see the results of globalism in uncontrolled immigration, which occurs not just because agri-business demands cheap labor; so does the meat packing industry in the Midwest; so does the poultry produce industry in the South; so does the computer industry in Silicon Valley; and so does almost every other organized institution in American life – labor unions, eager to refill their depleted ranks with foreign workers; churches, desperate to attract new congregations after their ministers have driven away their old ones with their bloodless sermons and their theology without thunder; and most of all the vast complex of government, education, social work, and therapy that perpetually seeks a new underclass on which to work its voodoo. The result is the further disintegration of the nation under the ideology and interests that globalism represents and the managed evolution of a new global regime, what we know as the New World Order. Back in 1993, journalist Pico Ayer wrote an essay in a special issue of Time magazine, largely paid for by the Chrysler Corporation, which has just graduated to a global company in its merger with Daimler, that laid out the globalist vision of the future: "In ways that were hardly conceivable even a generation ago," Ayer wrote,

the new world order is a version of the New World writ large .... A common multiculturalism links us all -- call it Planet Hollywood, Planet Reebok or the United Colors of Benetton. ... The global village is defined, as we know, by an international youth culture that takes its cues from American pop culture. Kids in Perth and Prague and New Delhi are all tuning in to Santa Barbara on TV, and wriggling into 501 jeans, while singing to Madonna's latest in English. ... As fast as the world comes to America, America goes to the world -- but it is an America that is itself multi-tongued and many hued.

Of course, globalism makes use of imperialism and of the underlying nations that it seeks to erode and transcend, just as a nest of termites makes use of a house. The corporations that boast of being transnational rather than American could not exist without the American economy, American workers, American consumers, and the American culture and legal system that creates them in the first place. The United Nations and similar transnational organizations could not exist without the funds supplied by American taxpayers.

The Glorious Multicultural America that twinkles in the mind's eye of the advocates of open borders and the abolition of national boundaries could not exist without the old, mono-cultural America, based on its British and European inheritances and populations. Globalism, just as much as the "struggle for the world" against communism, is an illusion, and it can become a reality only when it has destroyed the reality of nation, race, culture on which it rests.

But if globalism cannot easily become a reality, that does not mean that it cannot triumph, at least by the very destruction of the house on which it feeds. The New World Order that George Bush so indiscreetly disclosed as the goal of globalist policies back in 1990 is more than just a new configuration of the post-Cold War world. As Ayer suggests, it involves a domestic transformation just as much as it does an international one, and while its international agenda may stumble and falter on the intractable rocks of an American population that distrusts the United Nations and the promises of perpetual peace won through perpetual war, its domestic agenda proceeds apace. The transformation of American civilization through immigration, through the permeation of our schools and universities by multiculturalism, and through the ever advancing power of the federal government over its citizens is integral to building the globalist illusion, and it is a transformation that both political parties, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party, and both the right and the left have signed on to and help with.

The real conflict today, in this country as well as in Europe, is not between right and left, capitalist and socialist, and certainly not between nation and nation, but between nationalist and globalist. There are of course many forms and faces of that conflict, because the globalist agenda contains so many different facets, but it is no less a struggle for the world than the earlier struggle against communism was or should have been. In this new struggle we cannot depend on our ruling elites in government or the economy or the culture to fight it for us, any more than we could depend on their fighting communism in the earlier conflict; indeed, we can depend on them fighting against us, but we will have to fight it ourselves.

If it's a new enemy we're looking for, we don't have to go very far, and certainly not to the Balkans or Baghdad. The enemy is here, and it is no less an enemy -- of freedom, of nationality, of our whole way of life -- than the communists ever were. Once Americans awaken to the reality of its existence and the threat it represents, as many Europeans are awakening now, we should be able to defeat it far more effectively than we ever defeated our earlier foes.

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