* Cold War Update:
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed his counterpart, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh for a working lunch before announcing that the U.S. was easing up on the arms-sales embargo to Vietnam. It will help boost Hanoi’s maritime security against you know who.
It was a reminder that the U.S. has had normalized relations with the Communist country with human-rights challenges since the Clinton Administration. And that it will go to embargo-breaking lengths if it involves national security. And the only reason we had an (arms) embargo to begin with is because we lost about 60,000 American G.I.s in the ill-fated Vietnam War.
It was also an inevitable, ironic reminder that we still have our Cold War embargo with Cuba, a neighboring country with human-rights challenges that we’ve never been to hot war with.
* The other day the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman was commenting on how much “if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan” talk there was. He then pointed out that during the Cold War President Ronald Reagan had the benefit of working with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, the one time Reagan did face a “miniversion” of President Barack Obama’s Middle East challenge in Lebanon, it didn’t end well.
I’ll add this. What we now see with the barbaric ISIS, the internecine mess that is historic religious and tribal enmity and the proven impossibility of nation-building in the Middle East practically prompts nostalgia for the Cold War.
There was a time–the existential missile crisis of 1962–when mankind stood at a nuclear precipice. What saved us all was this: Nobody wanted to die. Not for an ideology, not for geopolitical leverage, not for proxies. If one side said, “We’ll have to kill you,” it mattered. No one answered: “Thank you. The afterlife can’t come soon enough.” How’s that for leverage?
No, dealing with Gorbachev–or even Leonid Brezhnev–is not to be compared with confronting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self appointed Caliph of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.