A little over twenty years ago, a group of concerned Americans formed
the Committee on the Present Danger. The danger they feared, and
sought to rally Americans to confront, was the Soviet Union.
It is easy to forget these days how controversial was the suggestion
in the middle to late 1970s that the Soviet Union was really a
danger, much less one that should be challenged by the United States.
This was hardly the dominant view of the American foreign policy
establishment. Quite the contrary: prevailing wisdom from the Nixon
through the Carter administrations held that the United States should
do its utmost to coexist peaceably with the USSR, and that the
American people in any case were not capable of mounting a serious
challenge to the Soviet system. To engage in an arms race would
either bankrupt the United States or lead to Armageddon. To challenge
communist ideology at its core, to declare it evil and illegitimate,
would be at best quixotic and at worst perilous.
When the members of the Committee on the Present Danger challenged
this comfortable consensus, when they criticized détente and arms
control, and called for a military build-up and a broad ideological
and strategic assault on Soviet communism, their recommendations were
generally dismissed as either naive or reckless. It would take a
revolution in American foreign policy, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
and the disintegration of the Soviet empire to prove just how right
they were.
