The Fighter Jock and The Gooseslayer

Where's Paul Nitze?" A U.S. intelligence expert complained to me a few months ago. "Where's our strategic plan? Where's the NSC-68 for the war on terror?" He was referring to the famous 1950 National Security Council memo in which Nitze, who died last week at the splendid age of 97, proposed a strategy for confronting the Soviet Union. But the expert was also remembering, with anger and nostalgia, an era that started with Pearl Harbor and ended with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, when strategic thinking in the priestly realms of foreign and economic policy was unpolluted by short-term partisan...

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