It is cheering to believe that America won the cold war through “blue jeans and rock’n’roll”, presidential bons mots at the Berlin Wall and other endeavours in open sight. But it was an unelected bureaucrat, George Kennan, who authored the conceptual framing of the conflict. It was another, Paul Nitze, who brought about its militarisation. The decoupling of China from the USSR took years of clandestine planning before President Richard Nixon’s grand gesture in 1972.
The US would not have overcome the Soviets without obscure officials who were screened from the vicissitudes of politics. This allowed for the largeness of vision, the consistency of tack, that democracies are not meant to be able to summon against longer-sighted autocracies. If the US is to enter another multi-decade fight for primacy, this time with China, it will need its deep state again. It will need such people as Fiona Hill and David Holmes, officials who testified last week in the presidential impeachment hearings against Donald Trump. That their work — in truth, their existence — is delegitimised by the same people who itch for this second cold war is not just perverse. It is a dismal sign of how the US will fare against a civilisation that literally invented the mandarin.
The US right should learn to stop worrying and love the deep state. Failing that, it should at least stop its active campaign against it. The present hostility goes beyond anti-government rhetoric: that is common enough in a country that does not even accord the state a Weberian monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. No, it extends to the bureaucratic understaffing or mis-staffing under the Trump administration that Michael Lewis catalogues in The Fifth Risk. Conservatives see in this a way back to a government of Jeffersonian sparseness. More likely, it will degrade the one functional piece of American public life.