There Is No Cordon Sanitaire--Anywhere

The notion of a cordon sanitaire, a perimeter invulnerable to attack, is no longer a viable one. The French learned this the hard way, as German forces merely flew over and around the Maginot Line. For the United States, both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were seen as separating and protecting us from Europe's and Asia's long histories of internecine warfare. Even during the Cold War, when inter-continental missiles bearing nuclear warheads became a grim and frightening reality, the U.S. nevertheless maintained an illusion of isolation from the old world's conflicts in the form of imminent land invasions or even attacks by the thousands of nuclear missiles that the Soviet Union had in its arsenal since we believed that our policy of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, would, barring the unthinkable, shield us from harm. This illusion of a cordon sanitaire was maintained--until the events of September 11, 2001.

Now, suddenly, the atmosphere of freedom from old world strife, in a nation whose mainland had escaped essentially unscathed by two world wars in the bloodiest of centuries, wars that had targetted civilian populations in the old world's greatest and richest cities, now, was replaced by a feeling of vulnerability. American exceptionalism was over.

For centuries in Europe and Asia, neighbors made the fiercest enemies, but here in the U.S. where Canada lies to the north and Mexico to the south, there has been no exchange of gunfire across borders for a long time. The one time in recent history when the U.S. had to face the prospect of an enemy in its "back yard," the period of the Cuban missile crisis, we showed ourselves willing to go to the brink of nuclear holocaust rather than live cheek to jowl with a hostile force. Our having successfully negotiated our way out of that modern day threat to the Monroe Doctrine led many Americans to believe that ours was a permanent sense of security--until, of course, that shocking day. In the aftermath of that day, our nation has been transformed. We were tense in a way we had never been before--and our language reflected it. The use of "homeland," for example, seemed a page out of the German lexicon, close to Fatherland, even closer to heimat. Our security plan was titled "the Patriot Act," and a host of terms that seemed to come more out of a propaganda ministry than to rise organically as descriptions of reality began to emerge. Euphemism and Orwellian language were not enough, however, to long conceal or disguise what was really meant by "agressive interrogation," or "rendition," or "collateral damage," among many others. If, as we have been told in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, a nation's economic health is based on confidence, it had become clear that its political health was equally dependent on confidence, rather than fear, and we had clearly lost it.

There is only one other nation in the world that seems to believe it can arrange its affairs so as to maintain a cordon sanitaire between itself and its enemies, and that, of course, is Israel. Although Syria and Lebanon are still problematic, Israel behaves as if it has transformed Egypt into Canada and Jordan into Mexico. For the Israelis, the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank are their Cuba, small islands that function as proxies for larger, more menacing national entities farther off. The constant onslaught on the Palestinians seem somewhat akin to successful Bay of Pigs operations seen through this lens. It would take nothing less than a paradigm shift for Israel to project a two-state solution in which (the now unimaginable) prospect of a Palestinian state with an air force and a viable military force lived in their midst. Another obvious manifestation of this same mode of thought can be found in Israel's determination to maintain itself as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East and beyond to its other Islamic adversaries. Israel behaves as if it had its own Monroe Doctrine in its area of the globe.