Clinton and the Cold War

Twice now in the past week Hillary Clinton has suggested that the United States President should use the threat of nuclear attack to cow Iran into submission. Twice now in the past week she has failed spectacularly to distinguish herself from the militaristic Machiavellis who dragged our nation into a foolish and tragically costly war which has placed Americans in greater peril than we were in prior to its commencement.

The two instances to which I refer are last week's farce of a debate and Clinton's appearance on Countdown this evening in which she stated unequivocally that the United States must threaten to respond to Iran's currently non-existent nuclear weaponry with "massive retaliation." Piercing my feelings of horror and dismay, I feel that a particular element of Clinton's newly emerging foreign policy position needs to be thoroughly and immediately explored: her decision to model the United States' treatment of Iran and the Middle East after the Cold War foreign policy of the post-war world.

In her conversation with Keith Olbermann today, Hillary Clinton made the following chilling statement:

"Well what we were talking about was the potential for a nuclear attack by Iran, if Iran does achieve what appears to be its continuing goal of obtaining nuclear weapons, and I think deterrence has not been effectively used in recent times. We used it very well during the Cold War when we had a bipolar world, and what I think the President should do and what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel."

There are two fundamental problems with Clinton's unfortunate decision to use the lens of the Cold War to frame our current relationship with Iran and nations in the Middle East. The first is philosophical in nature and the second is strategic; both are disturbing and to use Obama's terminology, "wrongheaded."

I'll begin with my philosophical objection. The Cold War was one of ideology, pitting the capitalist West against the communist East (oversimplified for the sake of a larger point). The goal of each contender was not to achieve some sort of conciliatory understanding or peaceful coexistence; the explicit goal was to crush the other ideology and its faithful adherents.

In framing the growing tensions between the United States and Iran through this "with us or wiped from the face of the Earth" lens, Clinton affirms the worst suspicions of U.S. foreign policy — that we not only view Western ideology (Christianity) as superior to Eastern ideology (Islam), but that we understand the goals of each "side" to be the utter destruction of the "enemy ideology." Clinton's A-bomb rattling is precisely the sort of language that incites the spread of violent extremism, and is very, very dangerous.

There are also two strategic issues that arise from modeling U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East after the Cold War.

First and foremost, the Cold War consisted of a stand-off between two nations that already had nuclear weaponry. In an attempt to assure that neither party deployed that weaponry, both sides engaged in a mad and costly arms race. The goal was not to prevent the other side from developing nuclear weapons; the goal was simply to have bigger, better, faster, more weapons ourselves.

This is a very bad model to use in our dealings with Iran for the obvious reason that the objective is very different: currently, it is in our best interest to convince Iran that they do not need nuclear weapons at all. Threatening to use our already existing nuclear arsenal against them is likely to accomplish the opposite. Granted, Clinton claims that "what we were talking about was the potential for a nuclear attack by Iran." But how is it wise to base our current foreign policy and choose our current words towards Iran on the assumption that they will already do the thing we are hoping they will not do? Is it not wiser to adopt an approach, a message, that will entice Iran into believing that we do not want to bomb the bejeezus out of (or perhaps into) them?

There is a second strategic problem with using the Cold War as a template in approaching the Middle East. While it was a conflict of ideology, the Cold War was fought on two physical fronts — the military and the economic. Not only did the proxy military confrontations between the United States and the so-called Evil Empire(s) result in wasted lives and resources, they were ultimately ineffectual in ending the Cold War. It was the economic front that resulted in the West ostensibly winning. The Cold War worked as a war of attrition; through effective use of embargo the United States was able to, for all intents and purposes, starve the Soviets into submission. They had nothing we wanted (well, needed), and we were more than able to thrive economically absent the USSR as a partner in trade.

It seems to me there is a rather massively glaring difference between that situation and our present economic position vis a vis the Middle East today. I'm more than supportive of a decrease in our dependence on foreign oil (or oil in general, for that matter), but I think it is foolish to assume that our Middle Eastern rivals (if we insist on constructing them as such) will spend 30 years glaring at us from afar and them implode.

And again, the underlying philosophical assumption if we adopt this Cold War model would be that upon the imploding of our "Islamo-fascist" enemy, our "winning" would result in replacing their problematic ideology with our superior version. There is no scenario in which a Cold War strategy of "deterrence" as thusly described results in a peaceful, long-term relationship between the United States and Iran.

Today Hillary Clinton has succeeded in validating every worst suspicion of United States foreign policy and the Middle East. God help us if she wins — and I don't care which one.