The Dawn of Cold War II.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: United States' attempt at world dominance - Brief Article

There is a theory afoot that the true motivation for NATO's war on Serbia is not goodness and kindness and mercy, but America's urge to achieve absolute world domination. If only it were so! What's a little Pax Americana compared to what now appears to have been NATO's real goal all along--the restoration of the Cold War?

We could have had one superpower, calmly enforcing the reign of the IMF and McDonald's, but the masters of NATO, in their passion for symmetry, determined that there must be at least two. And if they have so far achieved nothing else in Yugoslavia, they have at least managed to restore order and sense to the universe, in the form of a standoff between the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other. You can stop worrying about Y2K--just set your calendars back to 1958.

A prescient observer could have seen this coming exactly a decade ago, when it became clear that the other side was no longer willing to play its role in what will be known, soon enough, as Cold War I. At the news of perestroika and Gorbachev's intention to start scrapping his warheads, did Washington officialdom don funny hats, swill champagne, and run out to foxtrot through the streets? Not at all. In fact, the White House inexplicably derided the Soviet leader as a "drugstore cowboy" and hinted that perestroika was a diabolical trick. When then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney proposed a microscopic 0.3 percent reduction in defense spending to mark the sudden disappearance of any plausible enemy, outraged screams issued from Congress. "You are putting Grumman out of business," complained the Representative from that company's home district. What would have been welcomed as peace almost anywhere else looked to Americans like an enemy shortage.

Bill Clinton was supposed to lead us out of the old Cold War mentality--a fresh young President willing to serve Warner Brothers and Pepsi as well as Boeing and Lockheed. But in 1994, his Administration began pushing for the expansion of NATO to include a passel of former Soviet subject states. Yeltsin yelped, and even Pat Buchanan, whom no one has ever accused of being a pacifist, was aghast. Consider the logic here: What made the expansion of NATO possible in the first place was the disappearance of the only rationale for its existence, the Soviet empire.

Now if NATO were just a club for white people of non-Slavic origin, a place for them to gather over sherry and reminisce about the fun times at...