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.
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.
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