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Inheriting the World

How Memories of the Cold War Shape American Foreign Policy

  • In-Person
  • New America
    740 15th St NW #900
    Washington, D.C. 20005
  • 12:15PM – 1:45PM EDT

On December 2nd, Schwartz Fellows Nicholas Thompson, author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War and Peter Beinart, author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, discussed how the experience and memories of the Cold War shape American foreign policy. The event was moderated by Schwartz Fellow Paul Glastris, editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.

For nearly half a century, the Cold War dominated U.S. foreign policy. Encompassing some of America’s greatest successes and failures, its legacy has shaped U.S. debates over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relations with Russia, China and Iran. Beinart and Thompson began by discussing the relevance of the Vietnam analogy to President Obama’s Afghanistan policy and the history of the Vietnam analogy in public debates over past conflicts. Beinart pointed out that while the analogy was everywhere during the debates over the Gulf War and Bosnia in 1995, its mention dipped during the debate over Kosovo, and that by 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq war, Vietnam was rarely invoked. This, Beinart said, is reflective of the cycles of American self confidence. Thompson and Beinart also discussed reasons why the Vietnam analogy is inappropriate, as well its usefulness as a more general example of overreaching American ambition.

 Thompson and Beinart also explored at length the lessons of the doctrine of containment during the Cold War as applied to the war on terrorism. Applied to al Qaeda, Thompson said, containment implies that the U.S. could pursue a policy not of eliminating al Qaeda entirely but of limited their influence, isolating them, and leveraging internal cleavages between factions. Beinart argued that the main question of relevance then and today would be: containment of what? The idea of containment was such a broad church, he said, while George Kennan’s conception of containment might have applied to only Stalin’s Soviet Union, and would not have focused primarily on containing the broader ideology of communism. In Afghanistan, Beinart suggested, Obama is now shrinking the war from a broader ideological struggle — as defined by President Bush — to a more tactical one, a shift that reflects Nixon’s policy in Vietnam as he increased the troop levels but minimized the goals of the war.

 

Participants

Featured Speakers
Peter Beinart
Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
Author, The Good Fight: Why Liberals–and Only Liberals–Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again

Nicholas Thompson
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Author, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War

Moderator
Paul Glastris
Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

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