Much worse. There was something self-parodying about the thinking-the-unthinkable school; in retrospect, Herman Kahn seems more a performance artist than a theoretician -- comic relief compared to those two Council on Foreign Relations policy bots you interviewed the other day. While the US was very willing to use force in the past, it was just a bit embarrassed about it -- e.g., steadily frittering its power away in endless failed escalations in Vietnam. But there's no gap between thought and action for today's grim apostles of neoimperialism, no reluctance to wield whatever's available in the nation's arsenal. Don Rumseld's New Model Army is ready for use anyplace anytime in any degree, on any whim at all.
The stately melancholy and predictable chess-game rhythms of the cold war seem preferable to today's terrorists-under-the-bed public hysterias and the mercurial militarism of the current Washington establishment.
Carl
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