Weiner’s Folly
The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020, let us begin at the beginning, with the first sentence: “For seventy-five years, America and Russia have fought for dominion over the earth.”
The aging Cold War hawks among us might read a sentence like that with some degree of satisfaction:
We told you it was a long, twilight struggle; we told you the Communists in the Kremlin sought global domination; we told you the free world was imperiled; we told you the United States had to contain them and contest their dominance. So it is that Weiner’s acknowledgement of the nature of the struggle and the stakes involved, much at odds with the fashionable anti-anti-Communism that took hold during the Vietnam war, smells of vindication, if not napalm and victory, to the hawks in the parallel ideological struggle at home.