Using a Cold War Strategy to Fight Extremism

Steven StoddardContributorOctober 19, 2009Steven StoddardContributorOctober 19, 2009It has been nearly two decades since the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War met its sudden and unexpected end. Since then, terrorism has supplanted communism as the primary security concern for most western democracies, and the international political landscape bears little resemblance to the one that existed from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall.The conventional wisdom—and often-repeated platitude—is that “everything changed after the Cold War.”Andrew Bacevich recently challenged this view in an Op-Ed for the Washington Post where he argued, “instead of fighting an endless hot war in a vain effort to eliminate the jihadist threat, the United States should wage a cold war to keep the threat at bay.” Despite all that has changed in the international system, Mr. Bacevich was correct to liken the current struggle to the Cold War, as lessons learned from that conflict are clearly applicable today.The struggle against Islamic extremism is largely a battle over competing ideologies. It is tempting particularly in the West to differentiate between political and religious struggles, but that is a false distinction. Radical Islamists make no such separation, and one of their stated goals is to place ultimate political power in the hands of the religious establishment.The Cold War serves as an excellent template for success in a long battle over ideology. The U.S. has continually promoted its own values of individual freedom, democracy, and capitalism, and it exercised great social influence by exporting American music and popular culture abroad. These efforts certainly contributed to the ultimate victory of the Western system, but in the end it was the failure of the Soviet system, which proved most important to its overall success.The U.S. should learn from what it did best during the Cold War and emphasize the shortcomings of its opponent’s ideology. As any veteran of a political campaign knows, it pays to go negative. The U.S. demonized the Soviet Union throughout much of the Cold War and, while some of the criticism was unwarranted, the most powerful attacks were based on the truth.Atrocities committed by the Soviet military, domestic political repression and persecution, and an economic system that failed to provide even the most basic services, all undermined the legitimacy of communist ideology in global public opinion. Radical Islam must be framed in much the same way—as a bankrupt ideology that will fail to improve people’s lives.This task is not difficult. Communism and radical Islam share elements of authoritarianism and a basic disrespect for human rights. The U.S. must emphasize that terrorist attacks usually accomplish one thing that the overwhelming majority of Muslims find appalling—they kill fellow Muslims. This argument played a significant part in the decision by Sunni tribes in Iraq to turn against al-Qaeda, the results of which contributed greatly to the stabilization of the country in 2007.Given their fundamental dissimilarities, conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was inevitable. What the Cold War successfully achieved was to keep that conflict at manageable levels. The Soviets were an excellent partner in this regard because nuclear parity and a bi-polar balance of power lent a certain amount of predictability to this struggle.Of course the conflict was not without flash points, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. But by and large, the two superpowers found a way live together, however uncomfortable that existence may have been at times.Radical Islamic terrorism is a different opponent in many ways. It exhibits neither the predictability nor the capability of the Soviet Union, and the challenges posed by the threat are of a fundamentally different nature. It is important to note, though, that these differences necessitate a change of tactics, not a change in overall grand strategy.Today the U.S. faces an adversary that cannot be defeated militarily, and who holds an ideology incompatible with our own. This new enemy must be contained so the ideological struggle can run its natural course. Total defeat may never come, but the threat can be marginalized over time. Like the Soviet Union, radical Islam cannot sustain its own internal contradictions.