Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Was Truman Even Truman?

Yesterday, Oxblog's David Adesnik wrote:
For some time now, OxBlog has hoped that the Democratic party would return to the principles of Harry Truman, who recognized that strength and idealism are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. George Bush may have inherited Truman's mantle, at least rhetorically, but his policies still don't measure up. That is the Democrats' opening.
I'm not going to disagree with the idea that there's a meaningful gap between Bush's rhetoric of democracy-promotion and his willingness to cozy up to dictators or quasi-dictators who ally themselves with us in the fight against al-Qaeda. That's certainly the case (though I'm not sure whether such a policy is necessary under the circumstances or more trouble than it's worth in the long term).

My dispute is with the implicit characterization of Truman. Although history has (rightly, in my view) judged him kindly, Truman's foreign policy wasn't some kind of liberal-idealist-interventionist lawn party. Like Bush, Truman did some illiberal things and dealt with some illiberal partners in furtherance of his liberal goals. Truman didn't shun alliance with hard-core autocrats like Syngman Rhee or Chiang Kai-Shek (or a host of others), nor was he above having his CIA monkey with the 1948 Italian elections, because he saw these as the prices that had to be paid in order to keep his larger strategic vision - the containment of Communism - intact.

When Bush makes nice with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Thailand, he's basically doing what Truman did in the late 40s. As I said, reasonable people can disagree as to whether or not this is a sound policy, but I think it's nuts to argue that it's a substantially different policy than Truman pursued.