When dealing with ISIS, past lessons from communism apply

If anyone gives a second thought at all to the Soviet Union, it’s remembered as a backwards superpower that crumbled under its own weight two decades ago. But that wasn’t always the case, and the lessons of the emergence of communism a century ago apply now as the world deals with the dark wrath of the Islamic State. 

Just like ISIS is doing now, when Vladimir Lenin stepped off a train after ten years of exile and changed the course of Russia, he vowed death and destruction to his neighbors and the western capitalist democracies that were an anathema to his revolution. Lenin called on the workers of the world to overthrow their masters and promised a bloodbath to those on the wrong side of history and Marxist ideology. 

{mosads}In many ways, ISIS is threatening the same type of world upheaval and violence that Lenin espoused a century ago.  And they are attracting the same types of people: young, disaffected males who feel the current world has little to offer them. 

For a good two decades, Lenin and his successor Joseph Stalin meant it when they vowed to destroy the world. They established an organization designed to bring global revolution abroad while killing millions of farmers and capitalists at home. During the 1930s alone over 10 million Russians were murdered over ideology. 

ISIS has nothing on the Bolsheviks when it comes to murder, mayhem and upheaval. 

But then something happened: the Bolshevik aim for global revolution lost steam, and then was abandoned completely when Germans rolled into Russia in 1942. Suddenly, Stalin needed those capitalist democracies that he so demonized. 

But that wasn’t all that happened. Faced with the rise of communism, the United States and Britain especially rose to the challenge, and took it on militarily, politically, economically and socially. It developed a long-term strategy to win. 

And from that are lessons in how to deal with ISIS. The first and most important lesson is not to overreact. Like any emotional movement, it is recruiting young men who are looking for meaning in their life. The same happened in the 1920s and 1930s with the idea of a workers’ paradise in Russia. Just like now, those who are seduced by a romanticized message soon learn that reality is much different. 

But there was a deeper lesson in how governments reacted. They organized, collaborated, especially after World War II, to come up with a better solution to those who were peddling communism as some historical answer. And while the Cold War is mostly remembered as a military build up, in fact we engaged in a war of ideas that demonstrated that democracy and capitalism were a better alternative for a more prosperous future. Through the Marshall Plan, we invested in Europe’s future to ensure communism wouldn’t catch hold in vulnerable states. 

Now we must invest in regions of the world, like the Middle East and Europe, that are prone to extremism that the Islamic State offers. 

If we learned anything from that era that can apply now, it must be that those countries that see the ISIS movement as a global threat must realize that the military option won’t succeed alone. Ultimately, airstrikes and ground troops won’t win what will be a decades-long battle against extremist Islamists who want to turn the world upside down and have no issue using graphic violence to get attention. 

Demonstrating the superiority of freedom, individual rights and respect for other cultures will. After three decades of deploying an isolation strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Richard Nixon decided engagement – and showing the East Bloc citizens the benefits of western democracy – would place the Soviets on the defensive. He was right. It took 20 years but it worked. 

While wee can’t do that yet with ISIS as it’s constituted, we need a long-term plan. 

And it can’t be partisan. By and large, the Cold War was a bi-partisan collaboration. It was simply too important to play politics with (which is why Joseph McCarthy is such a discredited figure today). The White House, and Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, must sit down to strategize on a long-term strategy on how to blunt ISIS, not just military, but in the battle for ideas and culture.  

The Cold War was based on a strategy of containment, and that strategy was consistently executed whether the president was Democrat or Republican. Our leaders, starting with the 2016 presidential candidates, would be wise to brush up on how we won the Cold War. Because our new war isn’t cold, but it could take decades – and something more than airstrikes – to defeat what ISIS represents.

Galvin is CEO of 463 Communications.