INTERNATIONAL
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
Cold War on Terror
Old tactics in a new age of geopolitics
by KATIE FUSELIER ‘17
ver the past decade and a half,
the vaguely termed War on Terror has inspired comparisons to
the Cold War of the twentieth century.
Public opinion polls, however, show that
Americans find this era in history more
daunting than ever before; in the eyes
of the American public, threats to the
United States power seem to be increasing constantly. However, considering
that the United States has been engaged
in some sort of warfare or international
conflict every few years for the past century, this data raises the question of why
Americans are more pessimistic about
U.S. international relations in today’s
age. When comparing the two conflicts,
clear differences in American policy
towards the Cold War and the War on
Terror appear and, perhaps more importantly, changes in public discourse surrounding the War on Terror have created
a greater sense of threat and urgency
towards the conflict in the Middle East.
O
An Enemy Extinct
“We drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” In 1946, Albert Einstein spoke
these words in response to the completion of the Manhattan Project and the
dropping of the world’s first atomic
bomb. Though the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second
World War, the New York Times points
out that the scientific advances that followed the Manhattan Project—ironically, originally a suggestion of Einstein’s
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt—
launched more than four decades of Cold
War. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991, the United States and its people
lived in near-constant fear of a Russian
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attack on U.S. soil by a nuclear missile.
Additionally, suspicions about spy cells
within the United States itself were high
among the American population; the
infamous McCarthy era of Communist
witch-hunting clearly demonstrates the
depth of the fear with which Americans
regarded the Soviet Union and the threat
it posed to American security and power.
Because of widespread fear among both
the American public and policymakers about the potential for nuclear war,
American security policy as it pertained
to the Soviet Union was based largely in
carefully calculated diplomacy and in
rhetorical attacks on the communist system. With the exception of smaller proxy
wars like Korea and Vietnam, armed
exchanges between the real competing
superpowers, the Soviet Union and the
United States, were nearly nonexistent.
Instead, the summit reigned as the critical weapon of the Cold War. From Yalta
onwards, dialogue between leaders and
international diplomatic missions—
however unproductive—beca YH H