OP-ED: "A War Best Served Cold: Did George Kennan know the best way to fight terrorism?" by Nicholas Thompson, New York Times, 31 July 2007, p. A23.
The dearth of strategic thinking reaches a new low, or maybe this is just a Kennan scholar pre-hawking his new book.
Now we get the out-of-time argument that containment is the answer on radical Islam.
It's not much of an argument, but rather a decent rehashing of Kennan's thinking on the Sovs. The problem here, of course, is that al-Qaida doesn't translate well to an authoritarian empire already in existence.
Another problem, which I flayed at length in PNM, is that global historical forces are moving in a direction very different from that of the late 1940s and early 1950s. We're not in some bilat standoff of camps with little dynamic interchange between them. We're watching a consolidation period unfold following a massive expansion of globalization, one that's simultaneously accompanied by its further expansion thanks to the huge resource draw from rising Asia.
All that comes together to mean we're not exactly in a status-quo-protecting time, so waiting out the enemy doesn't exactly work even though time is amazingly on our side (far more than in Kennan's age).
I'm not arguing against realizing our strengths and moving with more strategic confidence. I'm just saying that anyone who thinks America somehow controls anything beyond its own actions is dreaming.
But, of course, it's that problem that Thompson seeks to address, so I respect what he's reaching for here. It's just that I find the wait-them-out strategic argument to be profoundly misapplied in this era.
Globalization will shrink the Gap in the next few decades. That's not our call, although we can certainly do much to sabotage that process at immense cost to our nation. But there is no waiting strategy that makes sense, unless we simply want to sideline ourselves from the process and the huge amount of rule-set resets on the horizon.
To me, that's not being careful. That's being very reckless and indulging in the sort of isolationist thinking that Kennan always battled in himself.
| Permalink |
