IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a "less complex time" and saying he was "almost nostalgic" for its return.
Gates should know. He himself is the quintessential Cold Warrior, having served nearly 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (facing off against the likes of Putin, who was for 17 years an agent in the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB). So we should take him seriously when he suggests that the problems of 20 or 30 years ago were in some ways more manageable than our current global predicament.
Nor is he alone. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia these days for the familiar contours of that bygone conflict, which has been replaced by a much more murky, elusive and confusing age.
The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world -- centered on Washington and Moscow -- and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it's true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other's biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.
They had divided Europe and divided Asia, and no one, except in the Korean War, crossed those lines. Even that conflict confirmed the essential stasis. Of course, they carried out surrogate wars -- in Asia, Africa and Central America, in Vietnam and Afghanistan -- but they never came into direct conflict. Hot lines, summit conferences and SALT treaties kept things under control. Polish and Czech dissidents might get tossed into prison but, hey, that was not a cause for an international crisis. Those were indeed the good old days. East was East and West was West.
Today's world is far less stable and indeed much less favorable to the comfortable Western democracies. It is not just that we face an almost-impossible-to-manage "war on terrorism," with all of its capacities for asymmetrical damage to ourselves, our allies and everyone else, even as we swat the occasional terrorist group. It is not just that we are deeply mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the whole Middle East may totter because of the failure (one hopes not, but let's not blink) to win on the ground. It is not just that we haven't a clue how to deal with the present, disturbing Iranian regime. It is not just that we haven't the energy to block Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez from his arrogant anti-American policies across Latin America.
