Harry S Truman
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By Francis P. Sempa
Real Clear Wire
Max Boot, one of the armchair generals who championed the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in his most recent Washington Post column suggests that President Biden can go down in history as one of our greatest presidents if he mimics the policies of Harry Truman. The United States is being challenged for global preeminence by a great power in the Asia-Pacific, and Max Boot wants the Biden administration to take its cue from a president whose policies in the Asia-Pacific were nothing short of disastrous. There was a good reason why people once said, “To err is Truman.”
Truman, who became a U.S. Senator as a result of support from the notoriously corrupt Pendergast political machine in Missouri, and whose road to the White House was paved by Democratic political insiders who knew in 1944 that Franklin Roosevelt was dying and would not serve a full fourth term and feared that Vice President Henry Wallace was too pro-Soviet, deserves some credit for belatedly realizing the extent of the Soviet postwar threat to Europe and reversing FDR’s appeasement of Stalin (and here, Truman benefited from the advice of the so-called wise men --Averell Harriman, John McCloy, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, and Charles Bohlen). But Truman’s Asia policies are a different matter.
The Truman record in Asia speaks for itself. On his watch (remember it was he who said “the buck stops here”) China fell to the communists, America failed to win the Korean War, and communists scored gains in Indochina. Boot praises Truman for “prudently choos[ing] a middle path” between the ”extremists from both left and right.” But there was nothing “prudent” about the Truman Doctrine which, as Walter Lippmann noted at the time, rhetorically committed the United States to defend free people everywhere, ignoring the need to link commitments to resources. And, as James Burnham pointed out at the time, Truman’s policy of containment ceded the initiative to the Soviets in the Cold War--a defect that was only overcome when Ronald Reagan implemented policies to win the Cold War. What Burnham later termed the “strategic prison of containment” led to stalemate in Korea and subsequently defeat in Vietnam.
Boot praises Biden for “marshaling an international coalition to sanction Russia and support Ukraine” and for “expanding links between U.S. allies in Asia and Europe” to “deter China from starting a war over Taiwan.” But what Biden is really doing is risking committing the United States to a two-front war instead of prioritizing the main threat in the Asia-Pacific. And worse, Biden has pursued policies that have pushed China and Russia closer, helping bring about a recreation of the old Sino-Soviet bloc.
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To be fair, every post-Cold War president, except Trump, contributed to the undermining of Richard Nixon’s brilliant triangular diplomacy with respect to China and Russia. Biden’s failure here is a bipartisan one. And one of the reasons the United States ignored the implications of China’s rise and the steady improvements in Sino-Russian relations during the first two decades of the 21st century is because we were distracted from focusing on emerging great power rivalries by fighting the endless wars championed by the likes of Max Boot. Come to think of it, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq resembled Korea and Vietnam, albeit on a smaller scale. We didn’t try to win any of those wars.
Looking back, the precedent for waging war without seeking victory was established by Boot’s hero Harry Truman. President Eisenhower threatened atomic war to achieve an armistice in Korea--the very threat for which Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur who had the temerity to publicly state, “In war there is no substitute for victory.” The Truman precedent was followed by Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, resulting in more than 90,000 American war dead without seeking victory. God help us if Truman is the model for Biden’s foreign policy.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, The American Spectator, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.
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