Cold War institutions outlive the conditions that justified them

Evidence

Second, American foreign policy thinking also suffered from a reluctance to abandon, alter, or at times even reconsider policies adopted to meet Cold War needs. With some this took the form of still seeing a resurrected Soviet Union as a potential threat. More generally people tended to sanctify Cold War alliances and arms control agreements. NATO must be maintained as it was in the Cold War. The Japanese-American Security Treaty is central to East Asian security. The ABM treaty is inviolate. The CFE treaty must be observed. Obviously none of these or other Cold War legacies should be lightly cast aside. Neither, however, is it necessarily in the interests of the United States or the West for them to be continued in their Cold War form. The realities of a multicivilizational world suggest that NATO should be expanded to include other Western societies that wish to join and should recognize the essential meaninglessness of having as members two states each of which is the other’s worst enemy and both of which lack cultural affinity with the other members. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 857

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to institutional inertia and path dependence discussions in the Milgrom law-merchant material and the FOI exemptions piece. — connects to: Institutions can outlive their purposes while their former foot soldiers move on. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 1576; Political ideology was never really dead after the Cold War — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 136; NATO reoriented itself after the Cold War and stayed valuable without a compelling threat — Robert B. McCalla, NATO’s persistence after the cold war, 29 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Huntington’s ‘essential meaninglessness’ of Turkey in NATO — worth checking how NATO’s 2024 enlargement to Finland and Sweden, and Turkish membership politics, updated this claim.