Vanderbilt Political Review Fall 2015 | Page 30

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 30 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 YHH