The sweeping conservative victory in last November's elections marks a reaffirmation of the politics of strength in America, of hawkish toughness, of faith in the efficacy of military power to "defend" us and guarantee our security; a reassertion of the belief that peace depends on the projection of our national power, on the perception by the rest of the world of our global supremacy; a rekindled faith in what I call in this essay the myth of peace through strength. This faith in the "deterrent" effect of American power is not new, nor is it limited to so-called conservatives. But the national consensus which had developed since 1945 around faith in the politics of strength was severely shaken by the Vietnam experience, which seemed to expose in so many ways the ineffectiveness, the inapplicability, and the counter-productive consequences of our enormous military, economic, and political power.

The past 18 months, however, have witnessed a remarkable revival of the old Cold War fervor, based on the strange delusion that the United States has become, in the wake of Vietnam,