I'd like to offer an alternative view of cold war history that's little discussed but critically important to understanding a great deal of past politics, current politics and, well, high school.
Remember high school? Remember the bullies in high school? As just about anyone who has successfully faced down the threat of daily antagonism can tell you-there's only one way to win.
Bullies are bigger and stronger and-and here's the real problem-damn tenacious.
Even if you get lucky and win today's fight, you still have the same problem tomorrow. Luck or smarts or strategy or asking your older brother to walk you home from the school bus are all just stop gap measures.
Nope, the only way to win against a bully is crazy.
You literally have to convince the bully you don't care, that you're capable of anything, that you just might be willing to drink a bottle of Jack Daniels before homeroom and then dance on the hood of the principal's car.
The psychology here is simple. If you can convince people you're really crazy, that you don't care about anything, than anything can happen the next time someone sucker punches you....
Anyway, it worked for me. It was about how I survived high school. It was a lesson I learned from Reagan.
Remember Reagan? As in Ronald. Remember Reagan getting MADDER Than MAD? I don't mean angry. I mean MAD—as in "mutually assured destruction," as in the military strategy that if the US and the USSR have enough nuclear weapons to totally annihilate the world neither will.
Technically, as many probably know, MAD is based on the work of mathematician John Nash's so-called Nash equilibrium-the idea that two sides will work to avoid the worst possible outcome.
Which was fine except the Russians forgot one simple fact. Reagan wanted to win the Cold War, not perpetuate the stalemate of his predecessors. His predecessors left him no options but MAD, but Reagan did them one better-he got MADDER than MAD
The whole time we were fighting the Cold War the USSR was thinking that we were thinking that global annihilation was the worst thing possible-but then Reagan started acting like communism was the worst thing possible.
In 1984, Reagan said "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you that I signed legislation that will outlaw Russian forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." He did this during the "sound check" of a press conference on Nuclear Arms Reductions. Supposedly he didn't know the microphone was "hot."
A guy who spent his whole life in Hollywood not knowing the mike was hot? I mean, really?
And while this might have been the case, Reagan did know that the Russian ambassador was sitting ten feet away from him and still went ahead with his barb.
So how do you defeat the enemy if MAD is you're starting point?
You move from MAD to absolutely out of your f^*&%ing Mind. Reagan did the presidential equivalent of drinking a bottle of Jack and dancing on the principal's car.
And this was only his starting point. Star Wars was the real keeper. Everyone, scientifically, knew the thing wouldn't work. But that didn't stop Reagan from pouring 100 billion into it.
A lot of people have pointed out that this was what really won the Cold War was excessive defense spending.....the scary suspicion that the President of the US hated the Russians so much that he was willing to dump boatloads of cash down a drain to nowhere just out of spite.
It made the Russians wonder, if he's willing to do this now, what happens the next time we sucker punch him.....
Reagan tipped the MAD scales. He convinced the Russians he was crazier than crazy-which meant he might just be willing to push that button, which meant ...well, perhaps nothing, perhaps everything. The iron curtain fell. Democracy defeated communism. Crazy worked. Anyway, that's how some folks see it.
Which brings me to Thomas Friedman's new column. Friedman, in this weeks NY Times, is upset about North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan—all semi-failed nation states that are crazy scary.
In two cases, the leaders are powerless, and the country is loco; in two case the leadership is loco and the country is hostage.
Friedman's problem is that the US is "adopting a middle ground strategy-doing just enough to avoid collapse but not enough to solve problems." Perhaps, but it seems like the real problem is we don't actually know how to solve the problems.
And what is the problem? Essentially that the biggest threats to our national security right now have faced down the bully by becoming MADDER than MAD.
Sure, we don't like to think of the US as the bully, just like we don't want to think someone as mad as N. Korea's Little Kim is actually sane enough to borrow Reagan's Cold War strategy—but how else do you explain N. Korea's missile launch a few weeks back.
The real problem here is MADDER than MAD works—and no one has yet figured out a way to defeat it.
I mention all of this because it strikes me as a basic psychological puzzle. To win this fight we have to figure out what exactly it means to get madder than mad than madder or, well, you get the problem.
I don't really know what the solution is, but my general assumption is that if the fate of the world is hanging in the balance-so maybe it's time we figure out how to graduate from this particular high school hell.
