Sputnik, Terrorism and China (Republished from Jan 17, 2010)

Sputnik, Terrorism and China

In History 341, we will be reading over the next few weeks about how Sputnik galvanized America to take the challenge of trying to get a person on the moon before the Soviets did. In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes from China asking "What's Our Sputnik?" He argues that we are spending a lot of time, money, energy, and blood focusing on terrorism, while China is quickly coming on track to supercede us as the world's leading economic power. I remember talking about 6 years ago to a professor in our department who specializes in China and goes to China often. He said that in 2004 he heard from people in China that they wanted Bush to win that year's presidential election because they thought Bush would keep the US bogged down focusing on terrorism and make the US a less effective economic competitor to them. Friedman quotes a Johns Hopkins professor speaking about Sputnik and the contrast with our "war on terrorism,":

“Our response to Sputnik made us better educated, more productive, more technologically advanced and more ingenious,” said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “Our investments in science and education spread throughout American society, producing the Internet, more students studying math and people genuinely wanting to build the nation.”

And what does the war on terror give us? Better drones, body scanners and a lot of desultory T.S.A. security jobs at airports. “Sputnik spurred us to build a highway to the future,” added Mandelbaum. “The war on terror is prompting us to build bridges to nowhere.”