Who wants to be ‘feared’?

Well, I’m still not particularly enamoured of the lackluster John Kerry. And no, despite what it may have seemed from this recent post, I certainly don’t want to see him being pushed any further to the RIGHT.
Anyway, today I happened on this piece by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYT. It’s titled “Kerry Foreign Policy Crew Has a Clintonian Look to It”, which is an accurate description of the situation, as evidenced by what Wilgoren writes about there… Basically, the same-old-same-old: Berger, Holbrooke, Perry, Albright (yawn), with the addition of a couple of slightly younger–but oh yes, most decidely white male–faces.
Zzzzz.
We don’t need that same-old over again. We need vision. We need a true commitment to internationalism. We need… well, a whole bunch of things very different from what these tired old retreads seem to promise.
Anyway, down there in the body of this piece, my attention was drawn to this handful of sentences, describing a conversation Wilgoren must have had with that tired old veteran’s veteran in the foreign-policy analysis world, Les (“let’s split Iraq into three!”) Gelb:

As an example of the toughness question, Mr. Gelb cited a phrase from the prepared text of Mr. Kerry’s Missouri speech about the nation being stronger and safer when it is “respected, not feared.” He [Gelb] had argued, he said, for “respected and feared.” At the podium, Mr. Kerry slipped in the word “just,” making it “not just feared,” language repeated Thursday.*

That got me thinking. As a U.S. citizen, I am of course happy if my nation is “respected.” (Which it hasn’t been much at all recently, under the culpably idiotic misleadership of our current Prez.)
So respect is good, yes. But why on earth should Americans seek to have our nation “feared”?
Part of this, I suspect, harks back to older doctrines of global strategic deterrence… “The only way to prevent those darned Soviets from hitting us with their nuclear weapons is by making quite clear to them that if they do, by golly, we’ll knock the bejeesus out of ’em right back!” That sort of thing.
Did anyone tell Les (“president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations”) Gelb that the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own massive contradictions back in 1993 and hasn’t been heard of since?
So where does the need to be feared stem from, nowadays?
I suppose if it has any rational (as opposed to little-boy-in-the-schoolyard-bullying) purpose to it these days (though I don’t rule that out, by the way), then it might be because some of these people want to affect the political behavior of other actors in the international sphere in the direction the U.S. government wants, by instilling in them some ‘fear’ of what the U.S. would do to them if they don’t do that.
Actually, that was the whole rationale behind “strategic deterrence” as well. And I always thought that, as a stance in the world, strategic deterrence had a lot in common with schoolyard bullying, as well. But the way I expressed the rationale of fear-instillation above, it could cover either deterrence or–a favorite concept of many Clintonites about a decade ago– “strategic compellance”, whichever you want to do.
But here’s a question. If the US government seeks to affect the behavior of other actors in the international arena by instilling a degree of “fear” in them, then how is this actually any different from what terrorists do?
The aims of terrorists, after all, are not directed primarily towards the individuals whom they kill, maim, or torture. They are directed towards everyone else in that “targeted” political community. The intention of the terrorists is to affect the political behavior of surviving members and leaders of that targeted community in the direction the terrorists want, by instilling in them some ‘fear’ of what the terrorists would do to them if they don’t do that.
When Hamas sends a suicide/homicide bomber to blow up Israeli civilians, that action is not considered to be part of a VERY longterm strategy whereby, over time, every single Israeli will have been killed by a lengthy series of such bombings. Instead, the real political intention of this terrorist action is directed toward that 99.99% of Israelis who are NOT blown up by the bomb: to try to “compel” them towards a situation where they concur in pulling out the occupied territories (or perhaps, relocating out of Israel altogether).
In a sense, there, the actual people who are blown up by the bomb are sort of necessary–in Hamas’s view–casualties along the path of that broader campaign. I could easily believe that there are even many Hamas supporters who would be even happier still if Israel pulled out of the occupied territories without any Israelis getting killed along the way.

[I note at this point (1) that I strongly disapprove of all of Hamas’s use of violence, and most particularly that portion of it that results in casualties among civilians, and (2) that I think they actually have the calculations about what effects their violence will have on political decisionmaking in Israel regarding the occupied territories quite dangerously wrong. But still, these two important caveats do not affect my broader argument here, I think.]

So what are we to say about this desire, exhibited by John Kerry but even more, it appears, by Les Gelb, that the U.S. should seek to be “feared” around the world?
That it is ethically quite wrong, yes. But also, it seems to me, that it is fundamentally wrongheaded and counter-productive.
If the leaders of the US, the nation that is indubitably the best armed and strongest (in many respects) in the world, think that it can only “get its way”– that is, “defend vital national interests”, bla-bla-bla–in the world through a naked projection of its ability to instil fear, then what on earth is the basis of our argument that other actors in the international arena who are far, far weaker than the US should not resort to the tactics of fear-instillation on their own behalfs, as well?
As I said, Kerry really needs to get himself some advisors who are better informed, and certainly more intellectually capable, than this tired old crew he has around him now.
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* In the online version of the article, they don’t have those very helpful little italicizations. Luckily, I have the dead-tree version in front of me, so I was able to add them in, as I found them there.