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5 / Demarcating the Nation: Naturalizing Cold War Legacies and War on Terror Policies Snow: Let me start basic here. Is the U.S. government becoming Big Brother? Dinh: No, it is not. We are engaged in a full-frontal war against terrorism and we are fighting that war on two fronts, obviously. Abroad, our men and women are fighting bravely. But here, we are trying to fight the threat of terrorism by preventing and disrupting future terrorist activity. We are very careful in targeting our actions, our regulatory enforcement and preventative actions [will be] directed at terrorists. If you are a terrorist, you have every reason to fear the United States of America. But if you’re a law-abiding citizen, you have every reason to be free from fear. —viet dinh, december 8, 2001 On the one hand, the Cold War is gone; we don’t have to worry about a Soviet Union with whom we are eyeball-to-eyeball, poised with weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have a much more disorderly set of threats, much more networked, much more widely distributed, much more difficult to deter and, unfortunately, much better enabled to carry out acts of violence because of what modern technology affords in terms of weapons, in terms of the ability to operate over the Internet, and in terms of the means of travel around the globe and communication around the globe, literally in real time or less. —michael chertoff, april 7, 2008 In early April 2001, an M-17 helicopter crashed into a mountain range south of Hanoi, killing all sixteen on board.1 Of the sixteen-member team, seven were U.S. armed forces personnel. Its primary mission—the search for soldiers’ remains—was part of a two-decade-long Vietnam War recovery program intended to facilitate closure for veteran’s families .2 Despite the war’s traumatic resonance within U.S. national memory , the April 7 crash received scant media attention due to another event in the South China Sea. Six days prior to the Hanoi crash and 297 miles away, a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese military jet demarcating the nation / 153 over Hainan Island in the People’s Republic of China.3 Labeled in major media outlets as the “Hainan Island incident,” the twenty-four-member American crew was summarily detained on a Chinese military base. For a tense eleven-day period, the recently installed George W. Bush administration and the People’s Republic of China government traded accusations of espionage, contradictory claims to “international air space,” and heated allegations about responsibility. While the U.S. commander-in-chief technically apologized for the collision (with the president publicly expressing “regret” and “sorrow” to the wife of downed Chinese fighter pilot Wang Wei), the Bush administration nevertheless refused to call off future spy missions in the region. And though a measured executive letter of apology was issued, leading to the crew’s release, the Chinese government rejected U.S. demands to return the downed spy plane. Within this politically charged milieu, the stage was set for an inevitable Chinese-U.S. foreign policy conflict.4 Significantly, the incident marked the first foreign policy crisis in the George W. Bush presidency, portending the East Asian focus of U.S. military strategy at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed, with emergent economic dominance and increased political importance, buttressed by an ever-growing industrial complex and strengthened military arsenal, China appeared to be the principal threat to U.S. national security. Concomitantly, the Hainan Island incident was geopolitically reminiscent of the Vietnam War. Located just west of the Gulf of Tonkin, Hainan Island was geographically near the site of the alleged August 2, 1964, “North Vietnamese attack” on the U.S.S. Maddox. The U.S.S. Maddox incident proved a foundational foreign policy event for the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, which used the assault as a pretext for war. Soon after, the president issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which signaled the beginning of the eleven-year Vietnam War. The 2001 conflict with the communist Chinese nation-state, Hainan Island’s geographic proximity, and the political back-and-forth potently gestured toward cold war déjà vu, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For these reasons, if the Hainan Island incident echoes Vietnam War–era geopolitics, then the M-17 Hanoi crash unavoidably harkens back to the...

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