Abstract
The American ability to think clearly about strategy did not survive the Cold War. As a result, the US worries more, and spends more, than is necessary to achieve its goals.
As the Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing, Georgi Arbatov sent a letter to the New York Times that contained a warning for the United States. Arbatov, who was one of the Kremlin’s leading ‘Amerikanists’, wrote that the Soviets were unleashing a ‘secret weapon’, one ‘that will work almost regardless of the American response’. It was not the stuff of Cold War nightmares, some sort of last-minute deus ex machina from the Academy of Sciences that would rescue the Soviet Union from oblivion. No, in this instance, the weapon was psychological and unequivocal: the Kremlin was about to deprive America of the Enemy.
In the 25 years since Arbatov issued his warning, the effects of the removal of the last great threat to the US have become rather clear. Although some of the specific predictions that he made have not come to pass – NATO avoided disintegration, for instance, and no significant wedges have been driven between the US and its allies – it is true that strategic thinking in the US has suffered without an enemy on which to focus. The West has no great threats to worry about today, and precious few smaller ones either; although those who get their information from the breathless media might not realise it, America is a fundamentally safe country. Pessimists may be able to point to a variety of minor and hypothetical future problems, but none are terribly worrisome, especially when compared to those challenges faced by other countries in earlier, less stable eras.
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