The new Cold Warriors

NO history of the Cold War would be complete without the mention of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a Washington-based lobbying organisation that brought together some of the leading figures in public life, with its main goal being to mobilise the American people and elites in confronting the threat of the Soviet Union and "to stiffen American resolve to confront the challenge presented by terrorism and the ideologies that drive it", as its mission statement put it.

Established during the start of the Cold War in1950, the bipartisan group included Democratic and Republican politicians, retired generals and diplomats and academic luminaries who were supportive of strengthening the US military as part of an overall effort to project a tough posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the communist bloc - the "present danger" identified as "the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union".

The CPD had gone through several iterations during the Cold War, and was transformed into a powerful voice of military hawks in the 1970s who were opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union pursued by US administrations at the time, many of whom ended up occupying top foreign policy positions under the hawkish and anti-Soviet Republican president Ronald Reagan.

NEOCONS

And a few years after the Cold War finally ended and its mission supposedly completed, veterans of the CPD - including those who later came to be known as "neoconservatives" or "neocons" - brought the organisation back to life during the War on Terrorism while promoting US military intervention in the Middle East and the policies of regime change and nation building there.

It was not surprising that following the US strategic fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan and the election of two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who were very critical of the neoconservative agenda, the general assumption in Washington was that the CPD would now probably find its place in the dustbin of history. Another organisation that has been overrun by events.

But like the famous pink Energizer Bunny in the Duracell battery commercials, the neocons keep going, and going, and going. And after a long absence, the CPD is back and kicking, and this time it is aimed at China, bringing together members of two foreign policy schools of thought, with well-known neoconservatives like former CIA director R James Woolsey, joined now by pro-Trump so-called nationalists, like former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

At its inaugural press conference in Washington last week, the founders of the New CPD aka The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) - 43 former government, military, and intelligence leaders, business executives and human rights activists - seemed to suggest that it was 1950 all over again.

All you needed to do was substitute "China" for the "Soviet Union", and you probably could have recycled the same press releases, talking points and speeches that the founders of the original CPD used almost 70 years ago. It was Communist China that now posed the most dangerous geostrategic and geoeconomic threat and ideological challenge to the United States and the world, and must be countered with stronger defence, economic, and political measures. Be afraid! Very afraid!

Chet Nagle, a former Navy pilot during the Cold War and a member of the 1970s version of the CPD, noted that the organisation's focus has consistently been on the need to confront global existential threats - the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1970s and then Islamic Terrorism in the early 21st Century. And now - China!

"Now another existential threat to America has arisen," Mr Nagle said of China. "That threat is Communist China's plan to dominate the United States and ultimately the entire world."

THREAT

The same point was reiterated in the press release issued by the CPDC which again brought up the same historical analogy. "As with the Soviet Union in the past, communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and the idea of freedom - one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat the threat," the statement said.

But then the problem with historical analogies is that they embrace the similarities, while smoothing over the particulars of each historical moment; and the danger is that they tend to be exploited by players who are trying to advance their political agendas.

Turning back into history and recalling the threats that had confronted the nation, and suggesting that history is repeating itself, and another threat is approaching, is certainly an effective way for a leader to mobilise public support for ambitious foreign policy and national security goals, like directing more resources to the military or allowing the government to take over parts of the economy.

But recall the earlier attempt by the CFD after 9/11 to invoke the supposedly existential threat of Islamic terrorism and to compare it to the kind of challenges that had been posed by the Soviet Union to US interests and Western values during the Cold War; and to then exploit that analogy to win public and congressional support for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention raising defence budgets and for creating new government bureaucracies that went on to spy on American citizens.

In reality, while the United States was certainly facing a serious menace from terrorism originating in the then (mostly) Muslim world, comparing that to the kind of threat the Soviet Union - a military nuclear superpower leading an ideological crusade like the Soviet Union had projected - was intellectually dishonest and self-serving. It did provide however an opportunity for an American administration to market the myth that Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden were allied and to advance a rationale for invading Iraq.

FAULTY HISTORICAL ANALOGISING

The founders of the new CPDC and their allies in the Trump administration and Congress are now engaging in similar faulty historical analogising: They are trying to transform a series of disputes between the United States and China - including over trade, technological competition, Taiwan, and the South China Sea - into a global confrontation in which China is seen as posing an "existential and ideological" threat to the entire West and is planning to "dominate the United States" and ultimately "the entire world", requiring therefore that the Americans marshal their military and economic resources and prepare for a long and costly war.

Consider the warning by one of the founders of the CPDC, former undersecretary of defence for intelligence Ret Lt-General Gerald Boykin, that the Chinese have "laid out the absolute road map for how they intended to take over America" and that they have been planting spies throughout the United States. "Every university in America is penetrated by Chinese agents," he said last week. "Every high-tech company in America in penetrated by intelligence agents - even the intel community itself has been penetrated."

At the same time, according to Mr Woolsey, the former CIA director, efforts by China's Huawei Technologies and other Chinese firms to develop the emerging 5G telecommunications technology should be regarded not just as a strategy of competing in the global markets - but as part of Beijing's masterplan to control the Internet and the entire global economy.

That there is no evidence that the Chinese are planning to take over the United States and to dominate the world, and that unlike the Soviet Union, China has not been trying to spread its ideology or promote its political-economic model around the world, does not seem to make a difference - not if you are attempting to convince Americans that the US and China are engaged in a zero-sum competition and that any step towards making a deal with the Chinese (let alone cooperating with them) would amount to appeasement in the face of a "clear and present danger" and could lead to US defeat in the evolving Cold War II.