I have a rather bizarre confession: seven years into this century I miss the Cold War. There, I said it.
Laugh if you must, but like or not, those are our good ol' days. This was the era marked by Sputnik, nuclear buildup, Nixon's "kitchen speech," Khrushchev pounding the U.N. podium with his shoe, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner," and Reagan's: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
Why did it have to end?
If we could have the Cold War void of the Berlin Wall, I might consider returning to those days. Back then the world was divided into black and white. Europe and Africa, in particular, was neatly partitioned between countries loyal to the U.S. and those whose allegiance lay with the Soviet Union. It was so civilized. The lines were clearly drawn; we knew who the allies were and the enemy.
Obviously, I am mostly facetious in my melancholy longings for an ideological struggle between East and West, when the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Moreover, autocratic and totalitarian regimes are the antithesis of the natural impulse to be free. But, in retrospect, we needed the existence of the Soviet Union much more than we imagined.
The Cold War tension that existed between the Soviets and the U.S. served as self-limiting, prohibiting each from engaging in grandiose notions of their ability to permanently shape human history.
As time has proven the existence of the Soviet Union, among other things, kept the U.S. in contact with its own limitations and vice versa. Now with no one to challenge us, we stood alone as the world's undisputed superpower. In our collective merriment of having won the Cold War, we gave ourselves permission to unleash an unbridled arrogance that had been under lock and key.
Since 1991, when we believe the Cold War ended, we have taken the so-called peace dividend and transformed it into such an untenable quagmire where the commanding general cannot state unequivocally before Congress whether the actions in Iraq make America safer. How does that sound to the families who have lost love ones?
The Cold War made realpolitik necessary, where post-Cold War it was optional, opening the door to ideology. Out of this sprang a conservative hegemony. But in the post-Cold War era, especially post- 9/11, many found this ideology to be coherent, easy to understand, and morally sound. It is has been subsequently proven to be none of the above.
America has been seduced by the temptation that befalls most empires, which is to see its own interest as central to human history. Likewise, if the Soviets had won the Cold War, they might have taken a similar path. But realizing how we got here does not fully address how we move forward.
We have once again proven the painfully obvious, where there's no real military solution unless the goal is occupation. We have also demonstrated that self-induced arrogance is far more destructive to our ideals than any enemy.
As Reinhold Niebuhr opined in 1952: "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."
Or maybe what's needed is for our own version of Gorbachev to offer some form of glasnost and peristroyka?
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. E-mail him at byron@byronspeaks.com or leave a message at 510-208-6417.