The Cold War on Terror

[Editor's Note: This story is part of a series of Audits of the Conventional Wisdom, a project of the Center for International Studies at MIT.]

Since the autumn of 2001, following the shocking attacks of September 11, President Bush and his advisers have repeatedly likened the war against terrorism to the confrontation with Nazi Germany in the Second World War and the long struggle with Soviet communism in the Cold War. But the current anti-terrorist campaign and the related war in Iraq are significantly different from those earlier contests.

Where resemblances occur, they are not comforting to our political values. And the comparative lessons that the U.S. government is proffering are not the ones that are relevant to dealing with terrorism. Mr. Bush signaled these comparisons in his speech before Congress nine days after the attacks, when he said the terrorists "follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies." The analogy, particularly to the Cold War, has been repeated many times since by the president, the vice president, and their lieutenants.

After the London bombing in the summer of 2005, two top aides wrote, "At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless of nationality. We have waged such wars before, and we know how to win them." The "war of ideas" theme remains prominent, as is the division of the world into those who are "with us or with the terrorists," as the president put it. The threat from al Qaeda and other jihadists, and the American response, are understood primarily in military terms.

As the 2006 National Security Strategy states, "We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by: direct and continuous action using all the elements of national and international power... ; defending the United States, the people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders... ; denying further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or compelling states," etc.

These frames -- freedom v. oppression, the world divided, the necessity of readiness to use overwhelming military force -- are directly borrowed from Cold War thinking. But are the perception of the threat and the construction of the response appropriate?

Lessons of the Cold War

The Cold War was a great power contest that had many dimensions. There was a "war of ideas," and there were military confrontations. But there were also proxy wars, vast alliances, and institutions for managing the conflict -- indeed, it was a highly formalized affair, with mechanisms, treaties, ambassadors, and so on specifically dedicated to defusing potential conflict. It was, most important, an inter-state competition. The states could and did speak with each other, negotiate with each other, trade with each other, sustain cultural and educational exchanges, and the like, for decades.

While the causes of the end of the Cold War remain a contentious topic, there is much to suggest that these dense networks, institutions, global norms, rational discourse, and civil society advocacy had enormously powerful effects in lowering tensions and opening opportunities to conclude the rivalry. The military competition was essentially a stalemate. Up to the end, American hardliners warned of Soviet nuclear superiority, for example, or their numerical advantages in the European theater. And the major proxy war -- Vietnam -- was a colossal failure for the United States.

The Cold War was ended by engagement, rather than "destroying the threat," and that is a powerful lesson. But because of the highly formal and state-centric nature of the confrontation, one has to ask if there is any relevance to the "twilight struggle" with Soviet communism.