PNM THEORY: REVIEWING THE DELETED SCENE ON THE RULE-SET SHIFT – PART I.

I decided that with Dr. Barnett swiftly tapping out his sequel to The Pentagon’s New Map, that I would try to review a few more of the important deleted scenes that were excised from that book. Because my first area of historical interest is the Cold War I’m going to tackle Deleted Scene # 1 “Rule-set Shifts From Cold War To Current Era” first in several parts.

My commentary will be in the regular text, Dr. Barnett’s in bold.

“Let me offer a dozen examples of the rule set shifts I think we have undergone since the end of the Cold War, but which were not apparent to us until 9/11.

First and most obviously, in the Cold War the old rule was that our homeland was an effective sanctuary thanks to our nuclear stand-off with the Soviets. They could not touch us at home and we did not dare touch them where they lived for fear of triggering global war. When the Cold War ended, the misalignment that emerged was our assumption that we could play a pure “away game” militarily (i.e., intervene overseas) with no incurred dangers back at home, and that simply was not true. What we learned on 9/11 is that if we took the fight to them, eventually they would bring it back to us, and since no relationship of strategic deterrence exists between the U.S. and these new bad actors (exactly which society do we hold at risk to deter Al Qaeda?), any “away game” we engage in from now on will necessarily trigger a “home game” heightening of security.”

This particular Rule-Set was actually rather short-lived – from the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis to 1990 when the United States began to gingerly interact with various power groups within the USSR itself. Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis the United States had attempted, ineffectually it turned out, to help nationalist resistance in the East bloc fight Communist rule or instigate it where it did not exist. The Soviets lacked any similar reach until Khrushchev’s reckless gamble in Cuba and had to be content with applying pressure on the non-communist outposts on the periphery of the Communist world such as Berlin and Korea.

After the Missiles of October, both sides sought to avoid any future situation where a direct superpower clash might be likely. The implicit deal here was acceptance of ” plausible deniability” of proxy war using client states or movements so as to check possible escalation to WWIII. The Soviets, Romanians and East Germans trained the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhoff Gang, various PLO factions, armed the Sandinistas, the FMLN and the ANC, unleashed the Cubans on Africa and North Vietnam on Southeast Asia. The United States toppled pro-Soviet leftists like Allende and Arbenz and nationalists like Mossadegh. Under the Reagan Doctrine, we created the Contras and armed the Afghan Mujahedin and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA.

While many would ( and did) decry that dynamic the critical outcome here was that no crisis, not even the Vietnam War or Afghanistan, resulted in a nuclear exchange.

The problem was that after 1991, when the likelihood of global nuclear war drastically diminished, American policymakers were still adhering to the old, obsolete, plausible deniability Rule-Set which required underreacting or not reacting to terrorist outrages.

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