How the Merchants of Death Won the Cold War
Whatever happened to that "peace dividend?" Viva Frei: "There's nothing wrong with isolationism."
Do you remember, with the end of the Cold War, how we used to hear about the “peace dividend” that would result when governments spent less on military hardware and nuclear bombs? Naturally, it wasn’t applicable to all countries that had avoided massive defence spending during the bitter and dangerous years of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Canada, for one, had spent freely on defence in the early years of the Cold War but had gradually scaled back that outlay until by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 it was one of NATO’s pauper nations and chose to live quietly and sometimes hypocritically under the American nuclear umbrella.
But surely the U.S. would have a peace dividend. With nuclear missiles going out of style and with its primary adversary imploding and rejecting the communist ideology that had made it such an existential threat to the peace and democracy for decades, it seemed likely that the U.S. could enter a new era of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world.
It would be the reward for all that work undertaken by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as they put their personal politics aside and made up their minds to change the world.
But their work and their legacy has been incrementally worn down over the years even as the seminal treaties they signed have been abrogated or ignored — largely by the United States.
It seemed likely that the U.S. could enter a new era of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world. But the Military Industrial Complex — first coherently defined by President Dwight Eisenhower in his outgoing address to the American people — was having none of it. It would find new enemies in the absence of the Soviet Union and new missions for NATO now that it didn’t have the Warsaw Pact to worry about in Eastern Europe. NATO, as led by the U.S. would enter a new era of what was dubbed “peacemaking,” as it began inserting itself into civil and foreign wars anywhere.