Abstract
Did the events of September 11, 2001 “change the world,” signifying the birth of an incommensurable brave new world of heightened uncertainty and insecurity? No. That headline-grabbing claim lacks historical perspective. Rather, the Cold War has exerted a profound impact on how America wages the War on Terror simply because the intelligence, bureaucratic, and military-industrial institutions that have shaped U.S. strategy since 9/11 took their present shape during the Cold War. Indeed, dramatic differences between the circumstances of the Cold War era and the dangers confronting the twenty-first century prevail, among them the shift from “conventional” to digital warfare, and from ominous nation-states to “rogue” states and sects. But the respective challenges and constraints shared by the two periods also possess notable similarities. Both the obvious discontinuities and the more subtle continuities with the recent past require judicious assessment from us today. Just as American leaders before World War II needed to “unlearn” the lessons of isolationalism in the 1930s in order to fight World War II, so too do American policymakers today need to unlearn the lessons of conventional warfare—including “intelligence” warfare–in order to combat rogue states and terrorist cells in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
See, for example, Derek Chollet and James Goldeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). Chilean director Mel Chin’s animated film, 9–11/11–9, has also publicized the connections between the two dates; the film won several international awards.
The now-famous phrase owes to the influence of Samuel P. Huntington’s book of that title: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Huntington contended that the “new world” of the post-Cold War period had witnessed the end of the “age of ideology.” Henceforth the axis of conflict would be along cultural and religious lines, ultimately embodied in the form of a clash between civilizations.
The association between November 1989 and “The End of History” owes to an essay of that title published by Francis Fukuyama that year in The National Interest, a journal of international affairs. Fukuyama appended a question mark to his title, but his postmodernist argument was that the collapse of communism in East Germany--and the full-scale discrediting of state socialism throughout Eastern Europe (and also the USSR)–represented not just the end of the Cold War or even the era of socialism since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Rather, contra Marx, Western liberal democracy represented the “endpoint” of history--not communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to Fukuyama, no further large-scale structural changes in systems of government and economics would hereafter occur. Fukuyama later expanded “The End of History?” into a book, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Samuel Huntington’s essay “The Clash of Civilizations” (1993) and subsequent book that included this phrase--which I discussed in note 1--were both conceived in reply to Fukuyama. Huntington maintained that the conflict between ideologies in recent centuries was a temporary phenomenon that had indeed run its course. But Fukuyama erred, he insisted, in viewing that conflict as fundamental or its passing as “the end of history.” On the contrary, contended Huntingdon, the conflict between ideologies was giving way to the ancient “core” clash between religions and cultures (or “civilizations”).
First gaining widespread currency at the end of World War I through Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in which he used the term to project a vision of a peaceful world arbitrated by a League of Nations, the phrase was relaunched at the close of the Cold War. Both Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush used it, albeit differently. Gorbachev spoke about a post-Cold War age of cooperation between the great powers of East and West. Bush’s accent was more unilateral, emphasizing a world in which the U.S. had become the sole superpower, thus able to lead the world with virtually uncontested authority.
Derived from the popular German phrase connected with 1945, Stunde Null (Zero Hour), which referred to the Germans’ hope that 1945 was not a year of disastrous defeat but rather an epochal moment for a Neubeginn, “Year Zero” became the English idiom for the same sentiment. The English-language phrase is also associated with the widely popular book by Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (London: Penguin, 2013).
Recalling the ebullient American mood in mid-1945, William Barrett remembered a conversation with his friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz: “1919! 1919!” Schwartz kept repeating. “It’s 1919 over again.” Barrett continued: “History never repeats itself, they say, but in this case, in this new postwar world of ours, it might repeat the pattern if not the detail. Surely some splendid and flourishing period lay before us even if we could not foresee what it would be like.”
For Barrett, Schwartz, and many other American intellectuals, the chant was “1945! 1945! It’s 1945!” And in this respect, paradoxically, they believed that history was repeating itself insofar as it was “starting over again.” Their feeling was that of a hopeful young generation before whom lay a seemingly limitless future of untold possibilities.
I borrow here for my own purposes the book title of an older colleague of Barrett and Schwarz, The Tradition of the New, by the art critic-historian Harold Rosenberg. The book discusses the post- World War II New York art scene in general and developments such as action painting in particular. See Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959).
As the Cold War still raged, Harry Howe Ransom, among the first analysts of U.S. intelligence agencies, published Can American Democracy Survive Cold War? (New York: Doubleday, 1963). He sounded an alarm that current observers ceaselessly repeat: “The existence of a large, secret bureaucracy [that is] sometimes pivotally important in making and implementing national policies and strategies raises special problems.” Ransom focused on the CIA, but his book possessed wide scope, and his warnings about the perils of secrecy for a democracy applied to all agencies in the intelligence community: the twin dangers of invisible government and of a tyrannical, arbitrary (“secret”) police.
On the use and abuse of historical and political analogies, see the Conclusion in my book, The Unexamined Orwell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
See Eric Goldman’s classic study on the Cold War, The Crucial Decade – and After: America 1945–60 (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).
Despite the headline-grabbing revelations by former Nation Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that allegedly include tapping the mobile phones of more than three dozen world leaders, spying—even between close allies—is nothing new. The publicity accorded to Snowden’s revelations derives less from new information released than from the documented confirmation they have forced from Washington about its domestic and foreign surveillance practices.
Many critics of Snowden, however, regard him as a traitor for his “theft” of documents that contain little about domestic surveillance or the transgression of civil liberties. Instead the vast majority discuss secret espionage operations against the cyber capabilities of adversaries. For instance, the Left-liberal Senator Diane Feinstein (D., Calif.), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, labelled Snowden’s release of classified documents “an act of treason.”
At issue are the contents of 1.7 million documents that Snowden copied from more than two dozen top secret storage compartments in computers at the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii. In June 2013 he released some of this material to reporters, such as those at The Guardian in London, which published them to international indignation—and soon to acclaim, earning the newspapers and their reporters Pulitzer and other journalistic prizes.
See, for instance, Edward Jay Epstein, “Was Snowden’s Heist a Foreign Operation?” Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2014, 13.
In December 2013 a federal judge called the NSA policy of phone data collection “almost Orwellian.” Judge Richard J. Leon concluded: “It is one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement. It is quite another that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the government.” Cited in Maureen Dowd, “Spying Run Amok,” New York Times, 18 December 2013, A23.
With reference to the contemporary relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the “Orwellian” aspects of the postmodern “surveillance state,” it is inviting to ask: Does Edward Snowden see himself as a victimized Winston Smith? Would George Orwell, the unabashed Cold Warrior who handed his private “list” of suspected Communists to the IRD (Information Research Department, Britain’s early postwar analogue to the CIA), have derided Snowden as a post-9/11 quisling?
Or the Orwell who hated Empire, championed “Freedom of the Press” (in his essay of that title), and suffered official censorship (Churchill personally nixed his prospects to become a wartime correspondent in India) have celebrated Snowden as a freedom fighter? Or, for that matter, how would Orwell’s American admirers, some of whom (like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, to name just two) lived until the mid- to late 1990s and witnessed the “end” of the Cold War and the so-called End of History--have answered? How would they have judged Snowden’s actions in the post-Cold War context of Islamic radicals’ war on the West? And the West’s responses ranging from drone attacks abroad to stepped-up surveillance at home? Would they regard him as a whistleblowing hero or criminal? As another Alger Hiss cum Julius Rosenberg? Or as another Daniel Ellsberg? (Ellsberg himself has defended Snowden.)
Impossible to answer – if intriguing (and potentially insightful) to ask. And also dangerous--as are all historical analogies if distinctions and details borne of patient reflection are not honored.
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Rodden, J. The Past Is a…Native Land?. Soc 53, 112–115 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-9985-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-9985-8