The coming storms
Scholars and pundits trade dark prophecies--and high hopes
So how is World War IV going? With the second Bush administration well underway--and now with a new terror alert to alarm the nation--it is hardly surprising that strategic thinkers are asking the question. What is surprising, though, is that so many leading analysts still disagree over the nature of the struggle: the origins, the stakes, the objectives, the definition of the enemy, and even the aptness of the word war itself. Differing loudly in a variety of print venues, from the popular monthly Esquire to the more scholarly Wilson Quarterly , they inadvertently drive home a common point: It's a curious war indeed that makes people argue over whether they are really fighting one.
But these debates are more than curious. They are of great consequence. And the reason is one on which most analysts would (uncharacteristically) agree: If the current struggle is as much a war of and by ideas as it is a war of arms, the character of the conflict is itself an idea with crucial consequences.
Names. The first to point out the importance of what we call this conflict was Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and considered by many a leading neoconservative thinker. Writing only two months after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal , he argued that "war against terrorism" was too nebulous a term. Comparing the current struggle to the Cold War--which he dubbed World War III--he said that World War IV shared key elements with its predecessor. Those included its global and protracted character, its mix of violent and nonviolent means, its mobilization of human resources (not all military), and its roots in an ideological conflict. "The purpose of the piece," Cohen says today, "was to get people thinking on what seems to me the right scale."
The term "neoconservative" is often used by detractors to reduce complex and varied positions to a monolithic ideology shared by indistinguishable think-alikes. But while, in fact, assorted neoconservative thinkers put forth diverse tactical and strategic positions, it would be fair to say that most share the view that the war triggered by 9/11 is, as Cohen first suggested, something larger than a police action. In general, too, they hold that terrorism is not simply a phenomenon that will vanish under the inexorable forward march of economic globalism, as, to some extent, President Clinton and his policy advisers believed. It would also be fair to say that many aspects of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war--and particularly its national security doctrine embracing both pre-emptive military action and the promotion of democracy as the only real long-term means of draining the swamps of jihadi terrorism--are heartily embraced by most neoconservatives. (No surprise, observers might say, since many helped formulate Bush's policies.)
Writing in Commentary , Norman Podhoretz has been among the most steadfast supporters. In last September's "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," he drew together several earlier articles praising the Bush doctrine and responding to its critics (as in the cogently argued "Israel Isn't the Issue"). In the February issue's "The War Against World War IV," Podhoretz asks whether Bush, in his second term, will abandon his aggressive agenda, succumbing to second-term doldrums, waning public support, or the steady onslaught of criticism. Arguing that Bush will not, Podhoretz offers full-throated endorsement of the World War IV paradigm. The only thing that stands in the way of America's success, he concludes, is a defeatist outlook that harps on the setbacks or possible dangers, whether in the Middle East or in America.
advertisement
