Our Rose-Colored Cold War

One of the soothing foreign policy fictions of the 1990s was that Americans had all been on the same side during the Cold War. Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, all shared a common enemy, a common goal and pretty much a common idea of how to reach that goal.

This distortion of history was reassuring to the Clinton administration, which, when confronted with any perplexing foreign policy challenge (Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo), could remark on how much more complicated the world had become in the post-Cold War era.

As communism was discredited throughout the world, it also became convenient for many Americans to gloss over how contentious anti-communism had been. In fact, almost every tenet and tactic of Cold War policy was divisive. Some Americans didn't doubt that an evil communist ideology wanted to enslave the world, while others found more moral equivalence on both sides; some saw anti-communism as the noblest purpose, while others viewed it as a pretext to empower the military-industrial complex and squelch civil liberties; U.S. foreign entanglements were for some a fight for freedom, for others a defense of imperialism.

Now those glossed-over divisions are re-emerging. The post-Sept. 11 unanimity also is eroding, with both liberals and conservatives challenging what they see as George W. Bush's vision of "permanent war." Small-government conservatives worry about the re-emergence of a vast national security establishment; liberals see a plot to maintain presidential popularity and thwart progressive initiatives. And as they begin to grope for a way to oppose the administration without seeming unpatriotic, they are echoing, sometimes explicitly, their Cold War divisions.

In the liberal American Prospect, for example, Paul Starr sees the war on terrorism as providing "the functional equivalent of the Cold War" to pave the way for "tax cuts, huge increases in military expenditures, deficits and the consequent exclusion of all the initiatives that liberals might offer." Lewis Lapham in Harper's Magazine says the significance of Sept. 11 is being exaggerated (the Enron bankruptcy is "almost as spectacular as the collapse of the World Trade Center," he writes, "but nobody pokes around in the rubble for a world-changing paradigm") in order to continue the Cold War task "of replacing the antiquated American republic, modest in ambition and democratic in spirit, with the glory of a nationstate increasingly grand in scale and luxurious in its taste for hegemony."

In the New York Times a few weeks ago, an analysis in the Week in Review reported that "some world leaders worried publicly that the war on terrorism was starting to look suspiciously like the last great American campaign -- against communism." Why is that a cause for worry? Because of the U.S. tendency to carve the world into good and bad, the Times said: "Like the terrorists today ... communists were often conceived as moral monsters." In the article, the possibility that they were moral monsters is not really entertained.

In one respect, acknowledgment of Cold War disagreements is encouraging, since it's hard to learn from history, at least on a political or popular level, as long as everyone is misremembering it. Learning from that period would seem especially important now, since so many of the fundamental Cold War disagreements resonate as the nature of the war on terrorism is debated.

Is it (was it) a fight against an ideology (communism, Islamic fundamentalism) or against nationalist movements making use of that ideology? To what extent does (did) the enemy have an address (the Politburo in Moscow, Osama bin Laden's cave) and to what extent is it diffused and self-replicating? Is homeland defense (color-coded alerts) as laughable as civil defense (ducking beneath desks in atomic-bomb drills), or is (was) the nation right to defend against threats at home?

Bigger Pentagon budgets, alliances with human-rights-abusing dictators overseas, military interventions in small Third World countries -- these were the source of bitter political confrontation during the Cold War, and they are reappearing as issues now. Of course, the issues will play out differently, and not all the answers will be the same in new circumstances; but on one level it should be reassuring to recall that none of this was, in fact, easy to figure out back then. And no surprise: It involves fundamental questions of the United States' nature and its proper role in the world.

What's not so clear, as the old debate resurfaces, is how many lessons have been learned. In the early going, the Bush administration's reluctance to share information, its ambivalence toward civil liberties and its embrace of authoritarian but useful regimes abroad all raise questions. Among critics on the left, the assumption that rebuilding the military and sending troops abroad is nothing but a political ploy or an imperialist reflex similarly raises questions. We have the benefit now of full knowledge of the Soviet gulag, China's man-made starvations, Vietnam's re-education camps -- we know that there were moral monsters among our adversaries. To act as though that was never true, and to assume automatically that the threat again is overblown, represents a different kind of failure to learn from history.

Fred Hiatt is on the editorial staff of The Washington Post, where this comment appeared.