I have an opinion on this. It is that no good ever came of rethinking. This is mainly because so little rethinking ever came of rethinking-it is mostly another kind of activity altogether, something more like rearranging things so that you or your think tank or your agency will not lose position or power or-God forbid-your entire reason for being under the changed conditions.
At the simplest level then, what we solemnly describe as rethinking tends to be little more than personal and institutional damage limitation: “To the lifeboats! [But be sure to bring the appropriated funds, the travel authorization, the grant for the $20 million pilot project and the coffee maker.]” The collapse of anything, in fact, from a large building to a large political empire will over the short run prove beneficial to the Washington political community. The reason is that it will be seen as immediately requiring more conferences, meetings, reports, commissions and so forth, with a view to assessing the new situation, i.e., rethinking. And all this has been well underway since the Soviet empire began to crumble in 1989 and 1990. What are we doing in Europe? What are the new (or old) threats? What should our purposes be? And, how much of a defense and intelligence apparatus will we need to fulfill those purposes? Or, to paraphrase Admiral Stockdale’s memorable opening lines: Who are we? Why are we here?
At some point in all this frenzy of inquiry and re-examination of first principles, there will presumably have to be some conclusions, and some are already on view. The latter tend to confirm one’s suspicions that the “thinking” part of the rethinking is a bit of a misnomer. People who were really thinking at all simply could not come up with recommendations that read like the opening statement of congressional testimony on behalf of an agency that doesn’t want its funds cut. (If you ever faked it on a college essay exam because you hadn’t read the book, you will know exactly what this kind of prose presentation sounds like.)
I am not talking here of a strictly contemporary phenomenon or some kind of downward drag of a previously thoughtful and admirable way of doing things. You can count really only a handful of actual grand “thinkings” in our post World War II approach to national security and foreign affairs-the famous George Kennan article advancing the concept of containment, the speech advocating creation of the Marshall Plan, some of the military strategy documents (such as the famous “The Delicate Balance of Terror” essay by Albert Wohlstetter) of the late ’50s, some of the more carefully reasoned assaults on our Vietnam involvement, etc. But like other countries, our reactions have tended to be less rational than reflexive, less the product of thought than of the stimulus of the moment.
That’s where we are now, peering out at the post-Soviet world and deciding what if anything we are supposed to do about it. Our problem is that we look at what is there and assume it will be there forever and immediately set about rethinking our policies as if it will be. Thus: Central and Eastern European and Central Asian tribal warfare, sub-Saharan African tribal warfare and destitution, old Soviet nuclear weapons dotting the landscape, a rich and implacable Iran, a commercially formidable and aggressive Japan. Some are actually homesick for the Soviet menace. It was good for appropriations and it kept the ethnic chauvinists inside the evil empire under control.
What is worth a moment’s contemplation here is not that anyone in his right mind would want that back, but rather that we all pretty much believed it was forever. Yes, there are a few who go around with documentation in their breast pockets proving that they said in nineteen seventy-this or nineteen eighty-that that the game would in time be up for the Soviet Union. But the overwhelming majority planned for a world in which it was here for good. This, I fear, is what the rethinkers are making now of the political and economic vista before them. They are positing a world in which ethnic hatred and subdivision, Japanese trade pre-eminence, African privation and the other now familiar situations stretch out into time and persist.
We have been so cataclysmically wrong in this kind of assumption over the years, that you would think people would be charier now. If you read a newspaper front page from five years ago, you won’t know what universe you are in. If you read only back to April Fools’ Day of last year, you will also wonder where you were or, more precisely, how you got to the Vancouver summit (“Brown wins Vermont precinct caucuses; Clinton third behind ‘uncommitted’”).
A contractor told me the other day the new roof for my house had a 20-year warranty. In what he regarded as an excessively ghoulish remark, I replied that this sounded just about right. But I think that long before the new roof and I both pack it in, the entire panorama that occupies the current American world view will have changed. Political reconfigurations and economic and joint-action military rescue missions will have stilled or at least diminished much of the turmoil and terror we experience now. The subject we will be talking about will be, well, China-and the relationship we will be working on and giving most of our time and attention to will be that with China, which will have become the economic and military giant on the planet. My supposition is that the rethinking class won’t get around to this one until the next round of rethinking, the one that comes after we are done creating a set of policies to deal with a perpetual Bosnia-like terrain, which won’t last. The thing about rethinking is that it always has to be rethought and you never have to say you’re sorry.
