Would be interesting if this happens...
The New America Foundation - New Voices, Innovative Ideas, Post-Partisan Policy
Hagel: The New Eisenhower
December 18, 2012
Chuck Hagel’s appointment would signal a dramatic shift in American foreign
policy—from the worldview of Harry Truman to the worldview of Dwight
Eisenhower. And that, says Peter Beinart, would be a wonderful thing.
Peter Beinart
December 18, 2012
In signaling that he’s likely to select Chuck Hagel as his secretary of
defense, Barack Obama is sending a message about his second term. In the decade
since 9/11, the spirit of Harry Truman has dominated American foreign policy.
Now it may be giving way to the spirit of Dwight Eisenhower. And that could
make all the difference in the world.
Truman’s foreign policy was grand. In March 1947, in his speech to Congress
requesting aid to Greece and Turkey, and then, more comprehensively, in a
secret 1950 strategy paper entitled NSC 68, Truman committed the United States
to containing communism everywhere on earth. It was a stirring cause, and
hubristic beyond words. The United States lacked the money and manpower, not to
mention the wisdom, to ensure that no new nation embraced communism (itself an
ill-defined term). And by making global containment the centerpiece of American
foreign policy, Truman set America on the path to Vietnam.
George W. Bush, who had avoided his own rendezvous with Vietnam, loved the
bigness of Truman’s vision, and set out to emulate it. Thus was born the “war
on terror”: a vow to use force, or the threat of force, to prevent any new
adversary from acquiring nuclear weapons and, ultimately, to transform
dictatorships into democracies and foes into clients. That limitless quest has
led the United States into unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
threatens to bring us into a third, in Iran. And like Vietnam, it has helped
bring us to the brink of insolvency as well.
Barack Obama knows this. But fearful of the Bush-era right, he has failed to
break decisively with the hubris he inherited. He withdrew U.S. troops from
Iraq, but in Afghanistan, despite grave misgivings, sent more. He has avoided
war with Tehran, but pledged to launch one down the road if necessary to
prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Hagel may represent a shift: a sign that Obama is finally willing to liberate
himself from Bush’s legacy. A painting of Eisenhower adorns Hagel’s office
wall. And Hagel resembles the 34th president in two crucial ways. Unlike
Truman, who believed that America’s epic post-World War II economic growth
meant it could afford epic increases in defense spending, Eisenhower—according
to his treasury secretary—“feared deficits almost more than he feared the
communists.” For Eisenhower, who believed that Moscow wanted to goad America
into “an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster,” the best way
to strengthen national security was to reduce unaffordable defense spending.
And he did so ferociously, cutting defense from almost 70 percent of the
federal budget when he took office to just over 50 percent when he left—and in
the process prompting four different Army Chiefs of Staff to quit.
Hagel’s assumption is the same: that since economic strength forms the
foundation of national security, slashing the Pentagon budget, and thus
reducing the debt, may actually make America stronger. “The Defense
Department,” Hagel has argued, “has been bloated” and must “be pared down.”
Hawks warn that cutting defense will make America more vulnerable to foreign
threats. But Hagel, like Eisenhower, understands that a nation cannot
meaningfully define its threats without first defining its interests. That
means determining which corners of the globe really matter to the United
States, and which don’t, and then figuring out how much defense spending you
need. “We have not had any real strategic thinking in this country for years
and years and years—strategic thinking in what are our interests,” Hagel told
the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s right, and just asking the question
would be a big shift from the Bush era.
The second characteristic that Hagel and Eisenhower share is their fear of war.
Eisenhower feared war because, as a career soldier, he had lived it. In a 1943
letter to his brother, he scorned intellectuals who opined about war but had
never seen “bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying
human flesh.” And Eisenhower feared war because although he was one of the
greatest generals in history, he knew that he could not control it. “Every
war,” he declared, “is going to astonish you.” And “for a man to predict” a
war’s course “would I think exhibit his ignorance of war.”
It was because Eisenhower feared war that after becoming president he resisted
his own party’s push for a new offensive in Korea, and instead settled for a
draw. And it was because he feared war that in 1954, with French troops
besieged at Dien Bien Phu, he refused Paris’ request for an air strike that
would have drawn the United States into Vietnam. “The United States never lost
a soldier … in my administration,” Eisenhower later exclaimed. “People ask how
it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen.”
Hagel, too, fears war because he knows it. In 1968 outside Saigon, a mine blew
up his armed personnel carrier, badly burning him and blowing out his eardrums.
As John Judis showed in a superb 2007 profile, Vietnam haunts Hagel to this
day. And perhaps the defining sentiment of his political career has been his
Eisenhower-like fury at politicians and pundits who advocate war without
understanding its horror. “It’s interesting to me,” Hagel told Newsweek in
2002, “that many of those who want to rush the country into war [with Iraq] and
think it would be so quick and easy don’t know anything about war. They come at
it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes
and watched their friends get their heads blown off. I try to speak for those
ghosts of the past a little bit.”
Had Hagel been around to “speak for those ghosts,” I’m not sure the Obama
administration would have sent 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in a “surge”
that, as Bob Woodward has shown, few in the White House believed could succeed.
Hagel has also been more reluctant than Obama to support, even hypothetically,
military action against Iran. Like Eisenhower, who scorned the idea that any
war, once unleashed, could be controlled, Hagel reviles the bloodless, almost
casual, way in which commentators discuss “air strikes” against Iran. Hagel
doesn’t talk about air strikes; he talks about war. “Once you start [a war with
Iran],” he told The Atlantic Council in 2010, “you’d better be prepared to find
100,000 troops because it may take that.” You can’t say “it’ll be a limited
warfare. I don’t think any nation can ever go into it that way.”
Hawks are terrified of a Hagel appointment. They should be. Hagel is that
rarest of Washington creatures: a politician brave or foolish enough to follow
his conscience wherever it leads. He imperiled a safe senate seat in an
overwhelmingly Republican state because he so fiercely opposed the Bush
administration’s foreign policy. It’s entirely possible that he’d resign rather
than support another Middle Eastern war. For the last four years, George W.
Bush and Dick Cheney have been silent partners in Barack Obama’s foreign
policy, continuing to define many of the assumptions that guide America’s
relations with the world. Now, finally, mercifully, that may be beginning to
change.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NewAmerica/~3/IsjjTtjnTdg/hagel_the_new_eisenhower_75968
Sent with Reeder
Sent from my iPhone
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
