Threats blurred for U.S. after Cold War

As the Cold War entered its final year, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked White House national security adviser Colin L. Powell, “What are you going to do now that you’ve lost your best enemy?”

Four U.S. administrations have struggled to answer that question, recounted by Mr. Powell in his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey.”

Over the past two decades, the United States has targeted and been targeted by adversaries ranging from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. But U.S. officials and the American people have sometimes had difficulty calibrating threats, hyping lesser foreign irritants into bogeymen while failing to recognize more serious challenges to U.S. national security.

When the Berlin Wall fell, “the U.S. lost the organizing principle of its foreign policy,” which had been containing the Soviet Union, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We’ve had two decades of debate, confusion, at times incoherence and at times success and overreach,” said Mr. Haass, a veteran of two Republican administrations — that of George H.W. Bush, who presided when the Soviet empire dissolved, and his son, George W. Bush.

In Mr. Haass’ view, some challenges, such as Saddam’s Iraq, have been exaggerated, while too little attention was paid to issues such as climate change, which threatens to destabilize many nations and create millions of refugees from droughts and rising seas.

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“Before this century is over, global warming, proliferation and disease could turn out to be the cardinal challenges of this era,” he said. “It’s entirely possible that the 21st century will be defined more by global challenges than great power rivalry.”

Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Haass’ boss as national security adviser to the first President Bush, agrees that the “the end of the Cold War was followed by a period of strategic drift. It’s pretty natural because what we had left behind is this existential threat of a serious mistake leading to a nuclear war which would destroy us, our enemies, maybe the world. All the threats in the world compared to that seemed minuscule.”

Mr. Scowcroft said Americans are slow to recognize threats until they become acute and have had particular difficulty dealing with problems that cannot be resolved by one nation acting alone or with a few close allies.

“It took us time for us to adjust to the fact that a lot of things were happening in the world that had been masked by the Cold War,” he told reporters and editors at The Washington Times recently. “So many more of the problems of the world take international cooperation to deal with — like climate change, like energy problems — that the whole nation-state system is under some attack.”

Mr. Scowcroft said the impact of globalization — particularly the speed with which information is now disseminated around the world — is similar to that of industrialization 250 years ago. “Industrialization built the nation-state,” he said. “Globalization is eroding the things the nation-state can do for itself.”

Stephen J. Hadley, national security adviser to the second President Bush, said the U.S. had been slow to appreciate threats from terrorism and nuclear proliferation in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.

“We took a holiday in the 1990s; rather than find new enemies, we did just the opposite” in terms of our military and intelligence budgets, he said.

“We were slow to realize that al Qaeda was at war with us and slow in responding to Iraq. It was the ‘end of history’ and the end of threats and the end of ideology. When people asked what would be the next ‘ism,’ nobody had any candidates. We were a little too complacent.”

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