oreover, the paper will conclude in its analysis that despite some basic similarities, with respect to the policies and politics of the cold war, the war on terrorism is in fact a whole new ball game- one that the United States has never played before.
2.New Enemy: Parallels between the Old and the News Bolsheviks?
Comparisons between Bush's policy and the American cold war policy have largely been dismissed on the basis that the cold war was about deterrence, while the Bush administration has taken quite the opposite approach to waging this war. This objection is rooted in a specific interpretation of cold war history that asserts that the United States made the intelligent, even moral, decision to utilize deterrence rather then direct armed confrontation. The interpretation, however, misses the basic reality that in a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), deterrence was not a choice; it was an unalterable stalemate in which both rivals were locked. Cold war political philosophy, however, is very much alive in the current administration and its being is manifested by exclusive inner-circle individuals within the Bush administration: "Wolfowitz often voiced the views of an outspoken group of national security conservatives in Washington, many of them veterans of the Reagan and senior Bush administrations" (Bush at War: 60). The neo-conservative movement, which venerates the Reagan administration as the tip of the spearhead that wo
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