Give me back the Berlin Wall . . .

DMZ

Good fences make good neighbors,the DMZ between North and South Korea, for instance.

Hal Brands on a 'Lesson' of the Cold War

Hal Brands

FPRI

Hal Brands, a senior fellow for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), has published an article on "American Grand Strategy: Lessons from the Cold War" (E-Notes, August 2015). Brands finds eight lessons, but his second lesson interests me:

Lesson 2: American engagement is the bedrock of international stability

A second key debating point regarding U.S. grand strategy today involves the question of what this defense spending and global engagement actually buy in terms of securing the international order. Does U.S. engagement foster stability and peace, as American officials have long claimed? Or does it primarily invite blowback and other undesirable behavior, as critics allege? The history of the Cold War lends some support to both arguments, but the balance lies overwhelmingly with the former perspective.

Perhaps the lesson from the history of the Cold War applies solely to the Cold War's history. Here's the support for stability:

U.S. global engagement during the Cold War was a response to the fact that the absence of such engagement had helped cause the catastrophic instability of the interwar era. And during the Cold War, it was precisely the U.S. decision to embrace the responsibility of organizing and protecting the non-communist world that allowed key regions like Europe and East Asia - particularly the former - to break free of their tragic pasts and achieve remarkable levels of stability. U.S. policy helped deter Soviet aggression and dissuade other disruptive behavior; it helped mute historical frictions between countries like Germany and Japan, on the one hand, and their former enemies, on the other; it helped foster the climate of security in which unprecedented economic growth and multilateral cooperation could occur. U.S. policy was not the only factor in these achievements, but it was the common thread that connected them.

This is a fact about the past. American engagement in the world during the Cold War is properly seen to have been a force for international stability. But does this fact about the past permit us to apply the same reasoning today? Brands himself asks this question:

What relevance does this history have for grand strategic debates in a period that seems so different from the Cold War? The relevance is simply to remind us that stability - and all of the blessings that stability makes possible - is not an organic condition of the international environment. Rather, it must be provided by powerful actors who are willing to confront those forces - national rivalry, aggression by the strong against the weak - that have, historically, so often pushed international relations toward instability and conflict. At a time when many of those forces again seem to be rearing their heads from East Asia to Eastern Europe - and when there is still no compelling candidate to replace Washington as primary provider of international stability - this lesson is especially important to bear in mind.

Brands's answer seems to be that since nobody else can provide stability, only the US can. That is not a very compelling argument. In a sense, the Cold War itself provided stability, a framework that pushed the two sides to find mutual benefit in agreements. Our opponents at that time were not suicidal. Today, however, we face enemies who are not rational in the sense that the Soviet Union was. The Islamic jihadists say that they love death, which makes them irrational from a secular perspective. American intervention against jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq have not stabilized the forces of order but have strengthened those of disorder. Maybe the rule of tyrants like Saddam Hussein kept order in their world comparable to how the rule of Communist dictators like Stalin kept order in theirs. Perhaps the order sought would have to have been kept by a certain distance of disengagement.

But it's too late for that now, so we face the dilemma of engaging and bringing more chaos or of disengaging and leaving more chaos. So . . . which is the lesser chaos?

Threatened with success!

Olen Steinhauer

Opting for overwhelming success?

(Image from Contemporary Nomad)

No, not I, though yesterday was my 1000th blog entry -- possibly a valid measure for some sort of success, I suppose.

No, the person threatened with overwhelming success is my online acquaintance and blogger Olen Steinhauer, about whose Cold War detective fiction, I've previously written, for example, his Bridge of Sighs:

The novel has some excellent moments in which Steinhauer evokes moods that one expects more from an older writer ... as in this scene from Brod's earlier, wartime escape working with an international crew of misfits fishing the North Sea:

They were all sweating from the heat of the boiler room next door, and there were too many of them, sprawled on the floor and the table, the wind hissing over the deck above them.

The Croat described the walk from his friend's palazzo to a canal that was overlooked, high up, by a covered bridge that connected two stone walls. The doomed, he told them. They crossed here on the way to the prisons. They call it the Bridge of Sighs. The Arab asked why. Because the prisoner had been convicted, and this was where he saw that, at the end of that short walk across the bridge, his life would be lived behind a stone wall. Behind iron bars. He would live and die in the dark.

A bleak silence fell over the cabin. No one spoke. Each man remembered his own bridge, but Emil, still so young, only knew he was missing the power of the moment, and said nothing.

Those of us who have reached a 'certain' age understand this moment implicitly, and I can't help but think of Marianne Faithfull singing the old Dubin-Warren piece from 1934, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which I think was played for me in Fribourg, Switzerland by my friend Tim Anderson around Christmas 1989, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fell from power. We didn't cry for Ceauşescu, but the shattered dreams of all those wasted Eastern European decades saddened us:

I walk along the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigolette
Can take a kiss without regret
So they forget their broken dreams.

After a certain age, who doesn't have a few dreams broken...

Olen, however, can now begin to dream big, for from his literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, he has some wonderful news:

Stephanie was the bringer of news: Warner Bros would be optioning The Tourist, with the plan for it to involve…George Clooney....

Clooney and Grant Heslov have optioned the film via their Smoke House production company. Who stars, I guess, is up to them.

Now, this is only an option on Olen's recently-finished-but-not-yet-published-novel, The Tourist, and time alone will tell whether or not a movie gets made, but if this option does lead to a film, then Olen's readership will expand exponentially, and deservedly so.

A hearty congratulation to Olen on his potential success, and for the other good news from his hardworking literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, who likewise deserves appreciation for her successful efforts on Olen's behalf.