Victor Davis Hanson writes today about another inexperienced politician who was suddenly thrust into the Presidency armed primarily with a Wilsonian Utopian view of the world:
Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945.
President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—especially in Iraq and Afghanistan—left to him by George W. Bush. But Mr. Obama's inheritance is mild compared to the myriad crises that nearly overwhelmed the rookie President Truman.
All at once Truman had to finish the struggle against Hitler, occupy Europe, and deal with a nominally allied but increasingly bellicose and ascendant Soviet Union. Within months of taking office he had to make the awful decision to drop atomic bombs on Imperial Japan.
At war's end, Truman was faced with a global propaganda nightmare. Stalin's victorious Soviet Union—soon to be nuclear—cynically posed as the egalitarian leader for millions of war-impoverished and newly liberated colonial peoples. In contrast, America accepted the difficult responsibility and expense of rebuilding the destitute former European colonial powers and rehabilitating ex-Axis Japan and Germany.
Some of Truman's initial military decisions proved nearly disastrous. After the atomic bombs forced Japan's surrender, he was stubbornly convinced that a nuclear air force could ensure American security on the cheap.
The result was that between 1946 and 1949 Truman tried to emasculate the Marine Corps. He mothballed much of the Navy and slashed the Army. Only the Communist invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950 finally woke him to the reality that there would still be plenty of limited conventional threats in the Cold War, and that he'd better rearm if the U.S. was going to protect its interests and allies.
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No matter: Truman constantly learned from his mistakes. Gradually, the president shed his Wilsonian trust that there would be a postwar global consensus under the aegis of the new United Nations. Instead, he came to believe that too many trans-Atlantic diplomatic elites had been terribly naïve about Stalin's murderous agenda.
Against the advice of his angry State Department, Truman supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the salvation of Greece and Turkey, and success pushing the Communists north of the 38th parallel in Korea all established the parameters of the next half-century of bipartisan American foreign policy. To craft a strategy of communist containment, Truman brought in conservative advisers like Paul Nitze, while working closely with Republican Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg.
Truman's no-nonsense Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president's doctrines: "Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose."
Harry S. Truman was derided by contemporaries as a machine Democrat with no special qualifications or abilities, yet he is now a highly respected President to whom history has been very kind (despite the recent efforts of left wing revisionists who have never forgiven him for using American power to advance American interests.)
In many ways the current discontent being evoked by Barack Obama depends upon the related questions of how he understands America's interests, especially as distinct from the interests of others, and whether or not he can learn from reality, which requires he undertake the effort of questioning his assumptions.
Thus far, learning from experience and questioning his weltanschauung have not been conspicuous elements of Obama's behavioral repertoire. His ability to accept/tolerate criticism is very limited and his intellectual modesty is relatively minimal.
If Obama is a typical politician, ie cynical about power and its workings, then altering course in the service of personal success (re-election) can be expected. If he truly believes and is committed to his weltanschauung, he will have trouble altering his course and all of us will suffer his growing pains.
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