DO WE NEED A NEW COLD WAR?

...A full-scale shift to the Right might crush the hopes some neoconservatives apparently still entertain of domestic reform...

...But if the neoconservatives should now become recruiting officers or apologists for a new Cold War, they will be jettisoning what is best in their outlook, in a bid for total intellectual dominance...

...Individuals who in the 50's were young academics or writers with histories of radicalism or Marxism barely behind them are now full professors, members of national commissions, and guests at the White House...

...So far these internal differences are muted, because each position manages to build its case in criticism of the same opponents-liberals who wish to use the federal government as an instrument of egalitarian policies but who also want to curtail the power of the President and the military...

...The question requires some definition of terms...

...In the May issue of Harper's, Frances FitzGerald goes further, concluding that Moynihan has recreated "the McCarthyite attack," trying "to shift the blame for the [Vietnam] war from the people who made it-all his old employers and his candidate for 1976, Henry Jackson-onto the people who opposed it...

...The neoconservatives' attitudes toward presidential power and centralized government converge less on what they oppose than on whom they oppose, and no strong resistance to Cold War should probably be anticipated on these grounds...

...Here the danger of escalation and losing control is real, and the certified members of the foreign policy establishment, Dr...

...It is not my intention to argue the merits of these contending outlooks...

...Or could these have been avoided had decisions rested in defter hands...

...our understanding, either of the proposed action or of our own principles, may be mistaken...

...Moynihan has done the former, not the latter...

...Leading figures in the group made their peace with Nixon...

...There are, in fact, within the framework of neoconservative thought, some good, though perhaps not overriding, reasons for opposing such a development...

...Unfortunately, by the same token they are not a very credible adversary, and it took the outrageous Zionism resolution, combined with Moynihan's eloquence and his theory of a rising tide of Fabian-inspired anti-Americanism, to make them even temporarily so...

...Purging the government of Communist sympathizers was not the main purpose of McCarthyism...

...Perhaps the United States should seize the Arab oil fields along the Persian Gulf...

...Churchill's earlier warning at Fulton, Missouri, that "through the world Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center...

...At the same time, Vietnam extinguished the domestic initiatives of the mid-1960s, drawing off funds and political energies from the Great Society, hardening the immature political movement that began with the sit-ins and ended with the Weathermen, and fueling the excesses of generational revolt and repression...

...and they have elevated this preference into a point of high theory and an article of belief...

...They lean toward stoic resignation, and like the Stoics who ruled the Roman empire they are apparently willing to accept improvisations they cannot believe in as part of the tragic cost of keeping a civilization together...

...instead, Israel should be subsumed under a general American policy of defending independent and democratic states worldwide...

...One must say "apparently," however, because advocating reform occupies so little of the group's energies in comparison with explaining why reform is (a) unnecessary, (b) unworkable, or (c) impossible...

...The first reason is obvious...

...Moynihan is not himself a McCarthy-and Marx may be right that history repeats itself only as farce-but he has accused several groups in this country of something approaching treason...

...Given executive leadership, or perhaps mere tolerance, the second crucial element is the mobilization of elites-congressional leaders, federal bureaucrats, the media, and politicized segments of business and the academy...

...Three phrases from the first days of the Cold War in 1946-47 sound the critical notes: Senator Vandenberg's advice that to win aid for the anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey, Truman had better "scare hell out of the country...

...One can assume that the neoconservatives would regret, as something more than a matter of style, the injuries and falsehoods a new Cold War would generate...

...In the past they urged awareness of complexity and unintended consequences against simple solutions and good intentions...

...McCarthyism was a way, in other words, of transforming what might have seemed a remote abstraction into a clear and present danger, so that sending money to Europe or sending troops to Korea could be represented as necessary measures of self-defense against a danger which had already moved inside the gates and even, as it were, under every bed...

...The less powerful the better...

...This raises, of course, a separate issue, whether a Cold War might be necessary strictly for foreign policy reasons rather than as an instrument of domestic advantage...

...The proposal I would like to examine is of this latter type...

...should adopt a "lifeboat ethic," providing food aid only to a few nations pursuing what we judge vigorous and sound policies of population control...

...A new Cold War would most likely further enhance the power of the presidency and the military...

...Nonetheless, entertaining such thoughts risks dismissal to the Siberia of "conspiracy theorists...

...To their alarm over the domestic state of the union, since the Yom Kippur war they have added an alarm over foreign policy...

...A new Cold War could possibly mean a shift to the Right which would submerge the neoconservatives along with their liberal and radical opponents...

...I believe that this country has enormous sources of strength, but that we will not be able to use that strength unless we begin to reconstruct our own society...

...That fear was not borne out by events, however, and Glazer concluded that the Jewish community's greatest point of exposure was its firm attachment to the increasingly precarious safety of Israel, a cause for which non-Jewish Americans might grow reluctant to sacrifice...

...For the second tendency the case is quite otherwise...

...The key is probably still the presidency...

...The process is not necessarily pretty...

...But if a politician took that step, would they welcome it...

...Not a few of the social problems of the 1960s and '70s had their roots in the decade of neglect that preceded...

...In fact, the group is deeply divided on this question...

...A new Cold War could provide, at most, a temporary respite from what ails America...

...Indeed Nathan Glazer specifically expressed the fear that a post-Vietnam and post-1960s backlash might find American Jewry particularly vulnerable, identified, as it often has been, with political dissent and cultural innovation...

...Since then they have regularly warned of a right-wing backlash, associated with figures like Wallace, Goldwater, Reagan and the more hyperactive military men...

...What is important is the momentary fact that our ideological responses are slowed...

...Win or lose, they (and all of us) will lose...

...Not only would a flurry of Cold War leave these deeper causes of the current malaise untouched...

...Of course, opinions differ as to whether these casualties were or were not needless...

...An atmosphere of emergency, the sharp division between friend and foe, the insidious danger within-these were the elements of the first Cold War and they would inevitably be the elements of a second...

...These have been accused of a catalogue of sins too voluminous to be repeated here, but they include: sheer incompetence, antinomian tendencies, relentless and unfair muckraking, rendering effective government impossible by prying into bureaucratic confidences, contempt for the work ethic and middle-class virtues, willingness to sacrifice liberty for equality, insistence on material and moral standards that cannot possibly be met by any institutions, and the induction of incapacitating guilt over America's failings...

...During the McCarthy period many of this group voiced fears of what they called the "yahoo Right...

...The over-critical media would be brought into line...

...The fact that several of the neoconservatives flirted with McCarthyism in the '50s presents a second source of uncertainty about the degree of reluctance they might feel today...

...Domestically, Jews might have more to lose from a turning inward of America than from nationalist turning outward...

...I add that such a Cold War would be one of the most destructive developments imaginable for American politics...

...Domestic policy was stunted...

...To what degree was the Cold War thrust upon the U.S...

...And especially why consider it In terms of possible domestic advantages...

...I mean the entire range of public and private harassment of Communists and their sympathizers, real and alleged, inside the government and out...

...There is an important difference between charging people with catastrophic attitudes-whether or not the charges can be sustained-and accusing them of treason...

...Podhoretz, I believe, is on record as opposing McCarthyism, at least of the narrower variety...

...I do not think that that conflict can be won by speeches in the United Nations, however eloquent, or by attempting to feed our own sense of doubt and uncertainty as a result of the disastrous policies we pursued for so many years in Southeast Asia...

...What can be said against it...

...In any case, this larger connection does not matter...

...When they complain about the press and the intellectuals, the charge is usually that these groups are complacent and, for representatives of intellectual independence, unduly chummy with the holders of power...

...The critics themselves would be subject to charges, nearly always effective, of national disloyalty...

...My own guess is by now obvious...

...They now envision a pincer's movement cutting off American support for non-Communist regimes, an alliance between the "knowledge industry," with its alleged socialist sympathies, and business forces, yearning for Soviet trade...

...Referring to a group of the neoconservatives' critics, Daniel Moy-nihan granted that "almost all were honorable men...

...Psychologically, however, the distinction is not so sharp...

...Another is that the proposal we prefer to dismiss may be so much in the logic of events, so likely to be contemplated, sooner or later, by persons in a position to effect it, that we had better have the matter out on the table for open discussion...

...Both of these tendencies agree that the United States is undergoing a crisis of confidence...

...They prefer that diplomacy be left entirely in their own hands, free from larger swings of public opinion...

...What bothered me-apart from the fact that there is such a small line between eagerly anticipating such an aggression and subtly encouraging one-was that, from his position, this conclusion makes so much sense...

...and General Amin is best of all...

...No great effort is needed to detect that my sympathies are generally with the first, though there are problems which it slights and which the second addresses with a good deal of insight...

...It could open the way for positive reforms...

...The Cubans, the Syrians and the Communist parties of Western Europe are other candidates...

...Such generosity toward their adversaries is not usually a neoconservative trait (they would reply, of course, that they have been afflicted with a bad lot of adversaries) but it may as well be imitated...

...In this view, Moynihan's performance at the United Nations was calculated less to achieve specific international ends than to boost spirits at home by denouncing enemies abroad...

...The report may not be accurate or it may be exaggerated...

...We have guilt because...

...Even those who would put the period in the best light, however, agree that the time came when responses the Cold War had engrained, in leaders as well as in the public, were drastically inappropriate...

...From the viewpoint of the neoconservatives, then, a Cold War has much to be said for it...

...Would it not, for instance, administer the coup de grace to the New Left and New Politics enemies against whom Commentary has been obsessively campaigning for years, just as McCarthyism, according to Podhoretz did to the pro-Soviet and anti-interventionist liberals of the postwar periods...

...Whatever its conscious intent may have been, its main effect-and the reason in all probability it was tolerated for so long by both major parties-was to bring home the Communist threat, to make it domestic, in order to mobilize popular support for a policy of fighting Communism abroad...

...For those of the first disposition, resolving the crisis of confidence requires those institutional reforms and changes in leadership which might assure that the decisions which led to the present situation will not be repeated and the institutional flaws which encouraged or allowed these things to occur will be mended...

...Nothing could better encapsulate the differences between these outlooks than the address by Moynihan at last December's Pacem in Terris IV Conference and some of the comments which followed it...

...For those of the second disposition, confidence can be restored only when we adjust our perspective on America's faults and flaws, recognizing that they are to a large degree the unavoidable lot of all nations like ours, and in nowise detract from the fact that, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan phrases it, "we are the party of liberty . . . even when least true to it...

...The legitimacy of institutions, claims of authority, and habits of discipline would be at least temporarily strengthened...

...The first is their tone of desperation...

...Attention was diverted from important problems, including a migration off the farms to the cities comparable to the great waves of immigration around the turn of the century...

...By Cold War I mean a national mobilization of opinion centering upon an external enemy, the emotional and ideological equivalent of war minus, for the most part, the bloodshed...

...Liberty may only be a rhetorical counter to equality and democracy, only another way of spelling order...

...A new Cold War might get out of hand...

...At least in the printed and widely quoted version of these remarks there is no suggestion that this decline and failure have in any way been merited, that there was something seriously wanting in the authority and "nerve" which locked the U.S...

...Nourished by the Cold War, institutions like the military, the FBI and the CIA extended their power over theoretically independent sectors of American life, planting the seeds of later disillusionment, distrust and cynicism...

...Norman Pod-horetz recently described the role of McCarthyism in solidifying America's policy of anti-Communist intervention after World War II...

...Referring to the war in Vietnam, Moynihan said simply, "Now this sort of thing happens, nations lose wars...

...Do we really have to ask ourselves whether the Left is better off shaping its convictions in debate with a Daniel Bell or a Daniel Moynihan than with a Ronald Reagan, a Phyllis Schaffly, a Herbert Stein, or a William Safire...

...But given the serious objections to a Cold War implicit within the neoconservatives' own outlook, objections which might take on greater weight as circumstances shifted or perceptions altered, I think that the grounds for hoping that my guess will turn out wrong can be found on more neutral terrain...

...The question is, how far have they come...

...The economic and racial stratification of American society, the power of corporations to shape or evade government regulation, the war in Vietnam, the demise of the Kennedy-Johnson social programs, the environmental and energy crises, Watergate, the recession-emphasis may vary but these are the items usually listed...

...Is it any wonder that while a phrase like "World War II mentality" might connote outdatedness, "Cold War mentality" connotes wrong-headedness...

...It would discipline the intellectuals and unify the country...

...The neoconservatives are in the process of establishing themselves as the "intelligent conservative party" which liberals always declared America lacked...

...There are several good rationales for this genre of article...

...Was the momentum it achieved and the injury it wrought inevitable from the start...

...and this could be another sticking point for the neoconservatives...

...Such an inconvenience, however, is not so likely to forestall most of the neoconservatives, whose intellectual center of gravity is not in "crisis management" or deterrent theory but in domestic politics and ideological criticism...

...Kissinger included, are apt to hesitate...

...He went on to discuss the "decline in authority" and the "failure of nerve" which has afflicted the foreign policy elite as a consequence of this defeat...

...I think there is a good deal of guilt in this country not because people have been reading the Communist Manifesto but because people have been reading about Watergate, the bribes by Gulf Oil, the efforts of the FBI to harass Americans like Martin Luther King, and the CIA's campaign against tens of thousands of American citizens...

...The first tendency is rather straightforward, sometimes naively so, in pointing to certain events and social structures as mainly responsible...

...The advantage of Moynihan's campaign against petty tyrants like Amin is precisely that most of them are petty...

...Truman's consequent decision, ignoring the caution of several advisors, to state his case in sweeping and absolute terms, beginning with the promise, "At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life...

...Political debate would have to be waged within the Cold War consensus, with political actors scrambling to seize and monopolize the high ground of loyalty...

...and some, while fearing centralization, consider the so-called "imperial presidency" a necessity for effective foreign policy...

...It will go tooth and nail between intellectual camps...

...throughout all the studies of shifting public opinion on foreign affairs, there emerges the stark fact that where the President leads, the people will follow-at least for a while...

...Further they recall, with some degree of confidence, the management of conflict which, even in Dulles's days, kept the first Cold War within bounds...

...The result of seeing the world through such a distorting lens has been to erode legitimacy, authority and discipline at all levels of society, setting the stage for the famous "failure of nerve" said to afflict the United States if not the entire liberal West...

...Would they tolerate it-as Podhoretz recalls the major political parties long tolerating McCarthyism...

...They may also be critical of social protest movements, but they generally assume that such movements are founded on genuine grievances and deserve at least an initial sympathy...

...Finally, although the group as a whole declares its attachment to "liberty," that attachment has remained extremely abstract, at least in regard to cases involving the United States...

...The answer depends on which of two views one holds of America's current situation...

...Both tendencies are well represented in the "public prints...

...Domestically, the situation is different...

...Moynihan, the neoconservatives, and Henry Kissinger, according to her, are creating the right-wing backlash they once said that they feared...

...I am not referring to detailed analyses of the forces at work in the economy and culture, but to two broad dispositions or tendencies into which we can group most of those analyses, allowing as usual for mixtures and mutants...

...The second broad disposition does not ignore these events or social structures, but it locates responsibility for our current crisis less in the events and structures themselves than in their interpretation...

...To what degree was it of our own making, either intentionally or through blunder...

...There are three sources of uncertainty in this connection...

...Thus the Third World is a better enemy than the Soviet Union...

...At least at first glance it seems that a new Cold War, even in the absence of foreign policy imperatives, would answer well to their analysis of what America needs domestically...

...Guilt would be relieved as we contrasted America with the enemy overseas, and intellectual dissent would be either quieted or isolated...

...Among the other "clusters of influence" which Moynihan holds responsible for weakening America's ability to compete ideologically with the Soviets, he discusses at length the "superior capacity of Marxist argument to induce guilt...

...They distrust native populism and the moralistic cast of American politics...

...still others retain the New Deal faith in a strong presidency and the federal government generally...

...There remains at least one more disadvantage neoconservatives, no less than others, might find in a Cold War-the inevitable excesses and injustices...

...They disagree about locating responsibility for that crisis...

...A full-fledged crusade...

...In part this explains why the term has come to have such a negative flavor...

...Not long ago, I heard that a prominent neoconservative had said he would consider an aggressive Soviet initiative as a godsend...

...In foreign policy, the Cold War set in motion the forces that led us, among other things, to moral and military defeat in Vietnam, thereby undermining a good part of whatever previous successes the policy of anti-Communist intervention had enjoyed...

...Where liberty has been assaulted here, their first concern seems to be that no one should let the assault reflect badly upon our institutions...

...History teaches us that these things do happen, and recent revelations remind us that our own leaders are not immune to the strains of machiavellianism that have infected other leaders at other times...

...Sooner or later-if not already-a serious body of opinion will wonder whether the United States might solve many of its domestic problems by launching a new Cold War...

...Glazer's resolution of this difficulty was logical (and a traditional strategy for minority groups): the defense of Israel should not be seen as a "special case," an exception to a broad retreat from overseas commitments...

...and "something approaching treason" does not bridge the gapFitzGerald may turn out not to have been wrong, only premature...

...The perceived threat from abroad and the threat from within merge into a single menace that could justify harsh measures...

...Internationally the easiest way to contain the consequences of a new Cold War would be to choose our "enemy" well...

...What would be the impact of a Cold War on the situation of American Jews...

...it might well divert us from a search for solutions...

...The high quality of their argument, its congruence to the needs of powerful economic and political interests and its overall coherence, in contrast to the ad hoc, issue-specific nature of much liberal criticism, have given the neoconservatives an exceptional influence for a relatively small group...

...The latter are cosmopolitan intellectuals, immersed in the ideological quarrels and the political tragedies of the century...

...But Carter or no, political life will be deeply affected by which disposition can establish the prevailing climate of opinion...

...This could happen internationally or domestically...

...To begin with, they believe that an increase in Soviet belligerence is more likely in the absence of a mobilized American opinion than in the face of it...

...Some observers say that they have...

...The suddenness with which other problems seemed to loom up, and the naivete which marked many early efforts to cope with them, also owed much to the fact that basic criticism of American society had earlier been either stifled or isolated by suspicion, or submerged in the mood of national self-affirmation...

...Or to put the proposal in question form: would another period of Cold War be domestically advantageous for the U.S...

...Accordingly, those so disposed point less to the decision-making elites than to the interpreting ones-to the intellectuals, the universities, and the media, what some have called the "knowledge industry...

...A Cold War, like any war, produces casualties, and the casualties commonly ascribed to the Cold War include much more than the individuals who were persecuted...

...but here he treats "the entire range of public and private harassment of Communists and their sympathizers, real and alleged," as simply the effective instrument of establishing a policy he approves...

...While this camp encompasses Henry Kissinger and occasionally Ronald Reagan and William Buckley too, its most articulate and sophisticated spokesmen have been the neoconservative intellectuals grouped around Commentary and the Public Interest and, until yesterday, supporting the presidential candidacy of Henry Jackson...

...I say that, to be sure, because of my adherence to the first of the two broad dispositions I delineated earlier...

...Perhaps Israel, with American encouragement, should become an open and full-fledged nuclear power...

...Meanwhile, their warnings of backlash have come to seem more and more like rhetorical weapons in their feuds with the Left, and the post-Vietnam backlash they anticipated has not, in any case, materialized-they might conclude the danger is not so real...

...This could be more than a defensive action, holding the line against further erosion of the Republic...

...but the realities of international politics are such that, independent of preference, the Soviet Union, or perhaps the old construct, "international Communism," is the only convincing contender...

...Is this not perverse...

...The point is not unrealistic: that is what the Cold War-any Cold War-must be all about...

...My own impression is that the only substantial disadvantage a new Cold War would pose for the neoconservatives is the risk that influence might shift to a provincial Right having little use for "pointy-headed intellectuals," no matter what their politics...

...Perhaps the U.S...

...One can draw from the writings of neoconservatives like Moynihan the conclusion that a better opinion of ourselves and a calming of what Samuel P. Huntington calls the "excess of democracy," in favor of the claims of expertise, are preconditions for achieving some moderate but significant domestic improvements...

...Glazer was not calling for a Cold War...

...Mr...

...The real drama of our times is to be played out in the arena of culture and ideology...

...The question is appropriate because many of the neoconservatives are Jewish, and issues like black anti-Semitism, the effect of quotas and affirmative action on Jewish interests, and the international isolation of Israel have played a critical role in their political evolution...

...And even as McCarthyism accomplished more than its ostensible aim, so would a new bout of Cold War...

...A Cold War would be no long-run solution, but in the long run we are all dead-or living in California...

...Why then consider the question of launching another Cold War...

...or he may, as hinted by his observation that "such hurts" are healed by "time and the circulation of elites," look forward to a restoration of the status quo ante...

...Unfortunately, the neoconservatives exhibit little confidence that solutions are possible...

...Periods of intense nationalism have usually been threatening to the Jewish community...

...By 'MyCarthyism' here I am referring to more than a demagogic technique of accusation or to the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy himself...

...Now it should be clear that for the first of these tendencies a new Cold War would be disastrous...

...In the loose confines of this camp can be found most of the liberal and socialist Left, from the New York Times, and Senator Church to Michael Harrington and Working Papers...

...Not only our experience of the '50s but the very metaphor of war suggests a domestic sacrifice justified only by international necessity...

...By fixing the country's attention on an external danger, it would almost certainly destroy the possibility of attending to the internal ills these critics espy...

...Would they oppose it...

...How heavy would that weigh in their estimation...

...One is that our initial reaction may be wrong...

...into "this sort of thing" in the first place...

...When those so disposed criticize elites, their criticism is usually directed toward the groups who by and large make the final decisions in our society-businessmen, politicians, and government officials...

...It is nevertheless hard to see them making common cause with Billy James Hargis and the Manchester Union-Leader...

...Why then have they not yet urged us in the direction taken by Churchill and Truman, and the somewhat different direction taken by Joseph McCarthy...

...The electorate, to be sure, appears vastly indifferent to either view, as witness the success of Jimmy Carter, who has escaped identification in these terms altogether...

...Between the Right that might profit from a new Cold War and the neoconservatives there is an undeniable gulf of style...

...Of course, one can go so far as to entertain the outright provocation of conflict with a foreign antagonist...

...It is one of the neoconservatives' strong points that, when not distracted by polemic, they worry about some of the longer trends in our history, trends in education, demographic patterns, economic aspirations, political culture, and, most serious of all, the decline of traditional religion...

...However unhappy liberals may be now that the neoconservatives have actually emerged, their original insight was correct...

...Again, there have been changes...

...Robert Nisbet is an outspoken critic of the growth in executive and military power...

...Pod-horetz now sounds the crusading note, Moynihan calls for ideological combat, Nathan Glazer insists that the truths about America's world role are really simple after all...

...To which Richard Barnet replied in the later discussion: "I think there is ideological conflict...

...others are regularly critical of centralization and the federal bureaucracy...

...Moynihan may in fact look upon the old "nerve" with a critical eye...

...I think this judgment is overwrought, and hence unfair...

...What follows from the neoconservative outlook is the desirability of a "little" Cold War, one not too difficult to control...

...But the policy he urged was not incompatible with one either...

...the black African states are better than the Third World, which includes the oil-rich Arabs...

...In each case the author presents a scenario which at first glance might offend our sensibilities, a scheme existing at the borders of ordinary morality...

...What can one conclude from this ledger of pros and cons...

...we have begun to sense that the spirit which was the real source of our strength is beginning to sap away...

...It is easier, therefore, to imagine merely the exacerbation of one or another of the many tensions that will always be present among nations, the focusing of public attention on these conflicts, or even the manipulation of opinion around some peripheral but explosive issue...

...It is not difficult to imagine how the United States, or its leaders, might "launch" such a Cold War...

...When pressed, they can defend mass culture and Main Street, but only by making a theory out of it-the Higher Boosterism...

...I do not think it is their style...