Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ron Robin. The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 277. $39.50.

The historiography of American Cold War policy has focused overwhelmingly on high government officials, with relatively little systematic knowledge being developed of the next level of bankers, manufacturers, civil servants, academics, and intellectuals. These two original studies contribute to illuminating the often crucial roles played by some of these groups in justifying and carrying out U.S. security policy.	1
Ron Robin offers a sweeping indictment of academic behavioralists—primarily psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists—for their uncritical embrace of the dominant paradigm of a ruthlessly expansionist communist enemy. Robin argues that behavioralists based at the Rand Corporation, the well-known Cold War think tank in Santa Monica, California, offered crucial observations on the nature of the enemy in support of American intervention in Korea and Vietnam.	2
Employing an argument developed by Thomas S. Kuhn for physicists, Robin argues that the paradigms of science ultimately are derived politically (or sociologically), typically in support of state-sponsored models. These paradigms become axiomatic and serve to reward conformity and punish genuine intellectual inquiry. In this case, behavioralists failed to acknowledge that theoretical knowledge and policy were disparate and that the former focused on innovation, originality, and inquiry, whereas policy focused on results, cost effectiveness, and applicability. Robin argues that "The conflating of theory and policy in the Cold War military-industrial complex caused havoc and eventually ruined the credibility of the nation's academic establishment" (p. 5).	3
While behavioralists were willingly coopted, humanists and liberal arts scholars were not recruited in significant numbers by Cold War think tanks. The "triumph of behavioralists, and conversely, the invisibility of humanists" (p. 55) produced skewed policies that embraced state-centered paradigms and ignored indigenous forces in the two major Asian battlegrounds. Behavioralists thus interpreted the Korean War within the established parameters of Soviet-sponsored international communism. With a Kremlin initiative on the proverbial global chessboard long anticipated, behavioralists quickly signed on to the Truman administration's unquestioned assumption that the violence in Korea came on orders from Moscow.	4
In reality the Soviets approved, but did not order, the attack, but the larger point emphasized by Robin is that the behavioralists ignored crticial issues of causation in Korea such as decolonization, the need for social reconstruction, and complexity in general. Robin argues that "The superimposing of American-made theories of behavioralism on the Korean reality allowed policy makers to suppress the genuine differences of this distant land and pursue policies with only casual links to reality" (p. 93).	5
The poverty of behavioralist conceptions emerged fully in Vietnam, as they bolstered a "coercive counterinsurgency" that ignored many of the same social forces that had been at work in Korea. Ultimately the Vietnamese peasants "failed" to weigh the costs and benefits and make the "rational" choice to bow to American power and abandon their quest for national independence.	. . .