Finding a Strategy for the 21sth Century: Lessons from Ike
William B. Pickett, Professor Emeritus of History
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
August 31, 2008
The SEALs’ worst day:
On October 22, 2007, SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy at a White House Ceremony received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously. The following is an excerpt from a book by Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor in June 2005 of a four-man mission of navy special forces in Afghanistan to find and capture or kill the leader of a group of terrorists, a mission that was compromised by local villagers and, before it was over, cost the lives of 11 SEALs, including Lt. Murphy, and 8 Army night stalkers. It was the worst single-day loss of American life since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
“In a sense it was pretty simple. We somehow had to get out into those infamous mountain passes and put a stop to this clandestine infiltration of faceless tribal warriors making their way across the border, doggedly, silently, prepared to fight at the drop of a turban.
We knew their track record, and we knew they could move around the mountains very quickly. They had dominated those slopes, caves, and hideouts for centuries, turning them into impregnable military strongholds against all comers.
And they had already faced the SEALs in open combat up there, because the SEALs had been first in. They would be prepared, we knew that. But like all SEAL operational teams, we believed we were better than everyone else, so the goddamned Taliban had better watch it.”[1]
A Predator strikes in Pakistan:
On the morning of February 1, 2008, national newspapers in the United States ran a story by Robert H. Reid of the Associated Press with the headline: “Al-Qaeda Leader Dies in U.S. Predator Strike.”
“Abu Laith al-Libi, a top al-Qaida commander in Afghanistan blamed for bombing a military base while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting last year, was killed in Pakistan by an airstrike late Monday or early Tuesday, a U.S. government official said Thursday. The strike was carried out by a Predator unmanned drone, the official said. It was conducted against a facility in north Waziristan, the lawless tribal area bordering Afghanistan. . . . Terrorism experts said al-Libi’s death was a significant setback for al-Qaida because of his extensive ties to the Taliban, but they said the terror network would likely regroup and replace him.”[2]
The art of strategy:
“The art of strategy is to determine the aim, which is or should be political: to derive from that aim a series of military objectives to be achieved: to assess these objectives as to the military requirements they create, and the preconditions which the achievement of each is likely to necessitate: to measure available and potential resources against the requirements they create and to chart from this process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course of action.”[3]
Eisenhower’s Campaign Address in San Francisco, October 8, 1952
“The essential need was to remedy what he diagnosed as Truman’s foreign policy pathologies . . . .poor leadership, mismanagement, and the failure to develop a comprehensive, integrated national strategy that encompassed the core and peripheral regions of the globe; established objectives for the long and short term, and set priorities; took into account America’s finite resources and the limits on what it could expect to accomplish; and ‘harness[ed] military plans to a coherent political program.’”[4]
This year’s presidential election resembles in some ways the one that occurred sixty-six years ago. That election, in 1952, was shortly after the outbreak of the Cold War. The Soviet Red Army had occupied the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet zone of Germany, American soldiers were dying in combat in Korea, and the president, Harry S. Truman, had lost the support of the electorate. The candidate with most experience in military and international affairs was the Republican, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He went on to defeat the Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson and a successful two-term presidency, a presidency which set in place the national security strategy that four decades later brought a favorable end to the Cold War.[5] Considering the historical parallels, two questions are worth asking: Is Ike’s precedent a good omen for the more experienced (and Republican) candidate, Senator John McCain, today? And what, if any, elements of Ike’s approach apply in today’s Global War on Terror? The planet is, of course, a much different place. The world’s population has more than doubled; the Soviet Union no longer exists; capitalism has taken root in resurgent Russia and China; the European countries have formed a strong economic union; a global communications revolution is underway; and the main threats to the nation are from fanatical suicide terrorists. While McCain has attempted with some success, to identify his candidacy with that of Ike in 1952, the former naval pilot’s preparation for the presidency--though certainly greater than Senator Barack Obama’s--does not approximate that of the general from Abilene. It is possible to conclude, however, that the new president in 2009, whoever he turns out to be, could benefit from examining Eisenhower’s approach to strategy—his focus on the right objective and priorities, balancing ends with appropriate means, and bringing the best thinking to bear on its formulation.
References to Eisenhower in this year’s election have included a Newsweek article in February about presidents with military experience who performed well in office. It featured Eisenhower, along with George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush.[6] More recently, that magazine’s foreign affairs columnist, Fareed Zakaria, wrote that Eisenhower was “perhaps the wisest president during the cold war . . . . His greatest virtues were those of balance, judgment and restraint.”[7] McCain, seeing the possible advantage, has pointed to parallels between today’s political climate and the summer of 1952 when an insurgent moderate wing of the Republican Party out maneuvered the isolationist regulars led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, giving Eisenhower the nomination.[8]
The parallels between today’s election and that of six and a half decades ago are easy to find. Responding quickly to the surprise attack across the 38th parallel by North Korea in 1950, Truman revised his national security policy, known as Containment. Though global in reach, until the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula it had relied mainly on political and economic aid to the countries of Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Truman in the summer of 1950, after news of the movement of North Korean armored columns south across the 38th parallel, asked Congress to authorize the provisions of NSC 68—emergency mobilization and deployment of American conventional and nuclear forces in both Europe and Asia--in effect militarizing and globalizing Containment. Similarly, George W. Bush, in response to attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, discarded his campaign pledge to reduce U.S. military intervention in other countries. He instead asked for and received authority from Congress to bring to justice the 9-11 planners wherever they were, if necessary overthrowing governments and installing new ones in countries that provided safe havens. Like Truman after the successful United Nations counter-offensive at Inchon, Korea in September 1950, Bush’s employment of military force brought initial triumphs, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 (and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq two years later). Like General MacArthur’s plan, to which Truman acceded, to liberate North Korea, in the months following 9-11 President Bush proposed to spread democracy by force of arms as a matter of both principle and self interest.[9]
Unfortunately, neither Truman’s initial successes nor those of Bush lasted. In late November 1950, the People’s Republic of China, having warned MacArthur against sending troops close to its border, sent 300,000 troops across its ice of the Yalu River into North Korea, surprising U.N. forces and forcing a long and bloody retreat. Truman’s political support at home plummeted. He had to fire MacArthur for insubordination when the general, communicating directly with its leaders, attempted to gain Congressional support for general war in the Far East. Allied forces in Korea, led by, MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, stabilized the battle lines in the approximate location, the 38th parallel, of the prewar division of the peninsula. As the death toll of American G.I’s continued upward (over 34,000 would die), Truman’s public opinion polls sank to 23 percent. After his defeat in the New Hampshire primary in early 1952, the president decided not to seek re-election.
For George W. Bush, a longer time passed after the initial emergency before his success began to fade. But in the summer of 2003, he realized that toppling the Iraqi government had not brought the hoped for result. U.S. troops were now fighting an insurgency of former Iraqi army officers, militias loyal to rival religious and ethnic groups, and terrorists from other countries. And since two of the stated reasons for invading Iraq—Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda--had not been found, critics at home and abroad began to question the war. Then, as stories of torture and abuse by American troops of prisoners appeared in the news media, they began to condemn it. The combat toll in Iraq by the summer of 2008 reached over four thousand American dead and 29,000 wounded--along with hundreds of thousands of casualties among Iraqis.[10] In Afghanistan, meanwhile, 40,000 American troops, leaders of a NATO contingent, were by that time fighting resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda operating out of sanctuaries in the tribal areas of western Pakistan.
The state of political affairs was no less devastating for Bush and the GOP by early 2008 than it had been for Truman and the Democrats in 1952. As in Korea, a change in American tactics--in this case the so-called “surge” organized by General David Petraeus--greatly reduced the violence and seemed presage a political solution. George W. Bush’s approval ratings nevertheless dropped at one point to 29 percent (and lower in some polls). With the electorate split along partisan lines, the Democrats (rather than the GOP this time) led by their presidential candidate, Obama, called for an early time table for withdrawal from Iraq and a shift of the strategic objective to Afghanistan. The Republicans, led by Senator McCain (Bush being in his second “lame duck” term) supported continued focus on completing the mission in Iraq without a set time for withdrawal.[11] By the late summer of 2008, negotiations with the new Iraqi government seemed to point to a reduced time frame, if not time table, and movement toward a reduction of U.S. troops. By then, however, the partisan battle lines for the presidential race were set.
Experience, as Obama, has frequently pointed out, is no guarantee of presidential success. Indeed, a lack thereof did not diminish the fortunes and standing in history of two of the nation’s most highly-ranked presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Neither was prepared by experience for the emergencies— the Civil War, in the first instance; and The Great Depression and World War II, in the second—from which they emerged as extraordinary leaders.
Still, history contains numerous costly examples of on-the-job learning by presidents. We now know, for example, that Truman’s decision in 1949 to withdraw American occupation troops from South Korea, followed by his secretary of state, Dean Acheson’s, speech excluding that country from the U.S. defense perimeter led North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, to believe he could absorb the southern half of the peninsula quickly by force. In 1961, John F. Kennedy’s authorization of an ill-advised, CIA-supported invasion at the Bay of Pigs resulted in a military debacle that paved the way for his failed first summit meeting with Soviet first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, and the subsequent belief by the latter that he could with impunity install nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Lyndon Baines Johnson, just four years later, accepted advice from his national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to send U.S. ground forces into Vietnam, leading to an ill-fated American take-over of that conflict from a weak South Vietnam ally. Jimmy Carter’s support for the Shah of Iran in 1977 preceded and provided a propaganda target for the fundamentalist Shiite revolution that occurred there two years later, inaugurating what became thirty-one years of hostility toward the United States and its allies.[12] More recently, the 9-11 Report revealed that neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush understood the nature and seriousness of Osama bin Laden’s militant anti-western activities. Bush, influenced by his vice president, Dick Cheney, and secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, went to war in Iraq, it is now clear, without properly appraising the strength of that country’s tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions; the debilitating effects on civil society of Saddam’s decades of cruelty; and, consequently, what it would take for the United States to bring peace and stability, much less democracy, to Iraq.
Senator McCain’s effort to identify himself with the first post-World-War-II GOP president makes sense on other grounds as well. One can see in retrospect, that Eisenhower avoided many mistakes that inevitably beset any president, whether from faulty intelligence, overbearing advisers, lobbying of the armed services, partisan ideologues, or emotional reactions.[13] Ike had learned from both professional training and first-hand experience that both war and international relations were the realm of the unpredictable and therefore that without a well-thought-out and disciplined approach, defeat or at the very least, serious harm was likely. Ike had to face a seemingly unending series of international crises during his two terms. They included revolutionary activity in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran; defeat of French forces by those of the communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, in Vietnam; a military take-over of the Suez Canal from Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. The People’s Republic of China bombarded with artillery Taiwan’s off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in both 1955 and 1958. A coup that overthrew the government of Iraq in 1958 caused the president of Lebanon to fear that insurgents supported by Egypt, with assistance from the Soviet bloc, were about to overthrow his government and possibly the governments of Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, as well. Fidel Castro, leading a revolutionary army, took over Cuba and moved that Caribbean island into the Soviet camp in 1959. Meanwhile, Soviet first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the Red Army in 1956 to invade Hungary; and, beginning in 1958, levied a series of ultimatums demanding that West Berlin to be incorporated into East Germany.[14]
Not everything went well for Ike. The Soviet Union was more intransigent than he expected; the Cold War, he soon realized, would continue well beyond his tenure in office. The launch by the Soviets of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957 brought public alarm and Congressional demands for a crash program to remedy a problem that, it later turned out, did not exist but which led to Democratic charges of a dangerous “missile gap.” An attempt by the Central Intelligence Agency to bring the overthrow of the Indonesian government failed. Ike’s national security strategy resulted in support for anti-democratic (though anti-communist) governments in such places as Iran, Guatemala, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, South Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic. On May 1, 1960 the Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet sovereign territory ended constructive negotiations toward a nuclear test ban treaty. In his farewell address, Eisenhower--who knew from U-2 aerial photography that the United States was ahead in every important measure of national strength, including missiles--warned against an “unwarranted influence, either sought or unsought of the military-industrial complex.” This lobbying nexus was, he said, a threat no less than world communism to “our liberties or democratic processes.”[15]
In retrospect, however, Eisenhower’s successes overshadowed his failures. He achieved an armistice in Korea (his most pressing problem in foreign affairs) in 1953; and by 1955 a NATO defense force with West German participation (completing Eisenhower’s mission in Europe as the first NATO supreme commander) was in place, the latter forming the basis for today’s European Union. He condemned the anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, of Wisconsin, and then, working behind the scenes, helped the Senate arrive at a resolution censoring him. Eisenhower strengthened the nation’s intelligence and military capabilities—although, greatly increasing its reliance on nuclear weapons--and, through a network of multi-lateral and bi-lateral treaties, its position in the world.[16] Except for an amphibious operation and three-month’s military presence stabilizing a situation in Lebanon that appeared to threaten the Middle East, he avoided military interventions.[17] Most notably in hindsight, he turned down a request by the French to rescue their forces surrounded by the Viet Minh forces in North Vietnam in 1954, supporting instead the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization.
The so-called Formosa Straits Resolution which Eisenhower obtained from Congress in 1955 authorized use of any means necessary to protect Taiwan from invasion by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. He ordered both clandestine operations (two of which, in Guatemala and Iran, were successful for a time) and efforts by the United States Information Agency to counter anti-American propaganda.[18] He supported the United Nations’ resolution that rolled back British, French, and Israeli occupation of the Suez canal zone of Egypt in 1956; carried on an extensive correspondence with Khrushchev and met the Soviet first secretary face-to-face in summit meetings in 1955, 1959, and 1960. He reduced defense expenditures (as did the Soviets) and balanced the federal budget in three of his eight years in office. His defense department’s advanced research projects agency established the first national computer communications system (ARPANET), the basis for today’s Internet.[19] His massive Interstate and Defense Highway construction program facilitated commerce, provided for rapid evacuation of cities in case of nuclear attack, and was a mechanism for stabilizing the economy.
Ike’s accomplishments owed much to the fact that he retained the approval of the American people and, of course, helped to bring that support. During his two terms in office, despite three brief recessions, the economy grew by 68 percent with only 1.4 percent inflation. Although the Democrats controlled Congress for six of his eight years in office, only two of his 181vetoes were overridden.[20] Had the constitution allowed, Eisenhower may have been re-elected for a third term. His popularity ratings in held at 59 percent, and his successor, John F. Kennedy, defeated Ike’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, in the election of 1960 by only a narrow margin.[21]
It is important to note, however, that John McCain’s considerable experience by 2008—including twenty-two years in the navy, followed by one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and three in the United States Senate—despite his desire to identify himself with Ike, does not come close to Eisenhower’s preparation for the White House in 1952. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the son and grandson of navy admirals, McCain has demonstrated resilience and character. As a fighter bomber pilot he almost died in two training accidents, one of which killed over a hundred of his fellow officers and men in explosions after an electrical short caused a missile to fire into other aircraft on the flight deck of the carrier Forrestal. He carried out twenty-three combat missions over North Vietnam before being shot down by a surface-to-air missile. During five and a half years in prisoner of war camps, his captors brutalized him, testing his patriotism and will to live. Later, after being released in the prisoner exchange following the Paris truce agreement and an extensive period of recuperation, he commanded a fighter squadron. His last assignment before retiring with the rank of captain was as director of the office of naval liaison to the United States Senate.[22]
Ike, for his part, by the time he ran for office, was a West Point graduate, professional soldier, global military strategist, and victorious wartime supreme commander in World War II. As head of the war department’s operations planning division he drafted the strategy in early 1942 by which the United States fought the largest war in history, with some 55 million dead. As supreme commander he was in charge of the allied, combined forces that defeated Germany in the European theater of war.[23] He thus had worked closely with allied heads of state. An international celebrity, factions of both political parties pursued him as their candidate for the presidency in 1948. He could brighten a room (or a crowded parade route) with his large, spontaneous, animated smile. He had studied history and the history of warfare back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Straight-forward and confident in manner, he had internalized the maxim of his mentor, General Fox Conner: “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.”[24] Thoughtful, constantly in motion, he had learned how to elicit the best efforts of staff assistants, subordinate commanders, and troops. Three months after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Eisenhower, by then a five-star general, became the nation’s highest ranking soldier, replacing his immediate superior, General George C. Marshall, as U.S. army chief of staff.
Ike retired from active military duty in 1948 to accept the presidency of Columbia University. With the outbreak of Cold War and, in 1948, a war scare with the Soviet Union, he accepted President Truman’s request that he advise the Pentagon regarding organization of the armed forces. Beginning in 1949 he served as de facto first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following summer, with the outbreak of war in Korea, Truman called Eisenhower back to active duty, this time as first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (SACEUR). His mission was to protect a disunited and vulnerable Western Europe from Soviet military/political intimidation by establishing a European defense force with an American nuclear deterrent.[25]
While Eisenhower had been ambitious for advancement during his long military career, there is little evidence the presidency was something he coveted. Indeed, he had disdained electoral politics as self-seeking, parochial in nature, and hazardous to the interests of the army. Before 1948 he had never voted. By the late 1940s, tired from the strains of war and peacetime command, his place in history established, he looked forward to a retirement of reflection, writing, sharing his memories, supporting worthy causes and enjoying his grandchildren. Still, he knew that it was the civilian politician in a democracy who made and carried out policy and had begun to worry that American political leaders failed to grasp the international threat. National power, Eisenhower told his friends and supporters, “is the mathematical product of spiritual, economic, and military strength. ‘If any one of these falls to zero, then the product of the equation—the influence of the nation in the international field—likewise falls to zero.’”[26] He and General Marshall, during World War II, both had internalized General Fox Conner’s aphorism about wars by democracies. “Fight only if you have to, but never alone, and never for long.” In the nuclear age, this entailed creating coalitions to deter war altogether.[27] By 1951 Eisenhower had come to believe, first, that the American way of life (tied closely to that of its European allies) was in peril and, second, that since he was in the best position to do so, he had a duty to save it--if necessary even, by running for the presidency. Accordingly, in October 1951, under pressure from his closest supporters and influenced by his belief that avoiding another global conflagration depended upon his doing so, Eisenhower assured close supporters he would enter the presidential race.[28]
“Plans are nothing,” Eisenhower often said, “but planning is everything. The secret of a sound, satisfactory decision made on an emergency basis, has always been that the responsible official has been ‘living with the problem’ before it becomes acute.’”[29] “The basic principles of strategy,” he also said, “are so simple that a child may understand them. But to determine their proper application to a given situation requires the hardest kind of work from the finest available staff officers.”[30] For many years after he left the presidency, because national security classification made the documents inaccessible, few people had a well-informed knowledge of the origins of Eisenhower’s Cold-War strategy. With the declassification of those documents in the 1980s, researchers began to fill this gap. In the early summer of 1953, they discovered, Eisenhower organized a five-week-long strategy-planning workshop code named “Solarium.” Held at the National War College, the workshop resulted in a national security policy known as “The New Look,” which revised and replaced Harry S. Truman’s policy of expressed in NSC 68. What came as a surprise to historians was the discovery that George F. Kennan, the State Department’s leading expert on the Soviet Union during the administrations of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and the intellectual source of the latter’s Containment policy, was a key participant in the deliberations. [31] Despite the fact that the GOP campaign platform of 1952 had criticized Truman’s foreign policy as timid and passive--calling for liberating Eastern Europe, not just containing communism—Eisenhower, once in office, had reached out to Kennan, who by then had embarked on a life of research and writing at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, for this one important assignment.[32]
As laid out in NSC 162, the New Look asserted that the United States, instead of using military power to overthrow communist governments, must protect and strengthen allies and assist countries on the communist periphery. The goal was not overthrow but rather to “create a ‘climate of victory’ that would bolster the morale of the free world while forcing the Soviet bloc on the defensive.”[33] It called for “strong, independent, and self-sufficient groupings of nations friendly to the United States centering on Western Europe (with Germany a focal point) and the Far East (especially Japan), and a position of strength in the Middle East.” At home, it sought economic growth, adequate intelligence, appropriate armaments, and “a U.S. capability for a strong retaliatory offensive [referring to the Strategic Air Command], a base for mobilization and continental defense.” It called for covert operations in response to threats and “action other than military to reduce indigenous communist power in the nations of the free world.” Meanwhile, the United States, when possible, would engage in negotiations with adversaries, seeking ways to reduce the threat and accompanying military spending.[34]
With the passage of over sixty years, the New Look seems less relevant today. The Global War on Terror exists in a world in which the population has increased from 2.57 to 6.6 billion. Among the largest increases (and countries where the largest cohorts are under twenty-five years of age) are in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Central Asia—including Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and Pakistan--where tribal customs and fundamentalist religions abhor modern culture. [35] Unlike 1952, the U.S. is no longer the world’s manufacturing and banking colossus. Instead, it depends upon foreign sources for both petroleum and consumer goods, with a large imbalance of payments, federal budget deficit, and a $9.5-trillion-dollar national debt funded increasingly by the no-longer-hostile People’s Republic of China (the PRC).[36] The immediate threats, again unlike 1952, are covert and “low tech.” McCain or Obama, for their part, must prepare, not for the nightmare of a surprise ground assault on Western Europe or an aerial one on the United States, but rather for suicide attacks by fanatic groups, often educated young men (and now often, women) without other meaning in their lives who are living outside the control of any government, their deadly missions assisted or made possible by laptop computers or cell phones with access to the World Wide Web.[37]
Still, important parallels remain and the possibility of useful lessons. Eisenhower, after taking office, shifted strategy from American global military expansion to American participation in several coalitions of nations responding in a variety of ways to crises around the globe. Today, as in 1952, the United States faces hostile forces--both covert and ideological—with ends-justifies-the-means philosophies (most often distortions of Islam) that, as did Marxism-Leninism, appeal to those downtrodden by poverty, disorder, or authoritarian governments. [38] In 2009, as in the earlier period, American strategy requires a combination of measures, none of which it can carry out by itself with any hope of success, and an ability to anticipate and adapt to threats. The United States remains the world’s largest economy, twice the size of the next largest, the PRC. To address the nation’s largest long-range problem--dependence it and its allies on oil from autocratic, unstable, or hostile countries--a new president might propose a twenty-first-century equivalent of Ike’s Interstate Highway Program, a public initiative and example to the world, to create domestic sources of clean, renewable energy. The United States continues to have, as before--with its intercontinental air and missile force, deep sea carrier task groups, and base agreements with more than thirty countries—the world’s dominant military capability. (The covert, dispersed, and technological nature of today’s threat, however, requires that--in addition to infantry, tank drivers, deep-water sailors, bomber pilots, and missile officers—the United States, working in cooperation with its friends abroad, must mobilize specialists in global positioning systems and unmanned aerial vehicles [UAV’s], experts who can track payments and monitor the movement of weapons material across international borders, and computer and software engineers [geeks and nerds] able to fend off “denial-of-service” viruses and/or spam messages.) And, finally, just as before, the United States and its allies must be prepared to deter and use diplomacy to reduce the threat of nuclear-armed missiles in the possession of hostile governments. A rogue North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, as does a politically-unstable Pakistan. And, of course, a hostile Iran, rebuffing international entreaties, seems intent on obtaining them, as well.[39]
In the twenty-first century, American and its allied troops--like the Cold-War Special Forces, but more than ever before--need the contradictory qualities of soldier/peacekeepers who are also trained linguists able to deliver medical care and clean water to indigenous villagers and, at the same time, help them to defend themselves from death squads. The United States needs to continue work with others to provide assistance (and sometimes refuge) for people caught in civil wars, natural disasters, or political tyranny. It needs to help governments of Third-World countries create systems of secular education to enable young men and women earn a living through useful work. As did Eisenhower in responding to the Soviet and communist Chinese propaganda, the new president will need to refine, augment, and expand the Voice-of-America and Radio-Free-Europe/ Radio-Liberty broadcasts and encourage private programs such as student exchange agreements and the People-to-People citizens’ exchange.[40] And, of course, in 2009, just as it attempted to win the hearts and minds of people attracted by Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, American strategy must support and encourage communities on the World Wide Web that reinforce moderate, mainstream Islam.[41]
But perhaps most importantly, the president who takes office in January 2009 needs to heed three basic elements of Ike’s approach to strategy. The first was his understanding that the means of waging a war must be appropriate to its ends.[42] For American society, the strategic objective remains that of preserving the American way of life—political, economic, intellectual, and religious rights and freedom via the rule of law; the upholding of “individual enterprise and initiative . . . the social bonds of family, school, church, and neighborhood.”[43] Eisenhower moved against both the partisan Red baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy and the resulting excessive spending for national defense. Under Ike’s leadership, the United States, although modernizing and increasing the readiness and explosive power of its military, sought to avoid situations in which combat, with its tendency to escalate, might be necessary.[44] Similarly, in the Global War on Terror, the United States must continue to both deter missile attacks and intervene as necessary to provide stability in situations vital to the long-term national interest, continuing, as before, to avoid actions that could result in use of unrestricted or excessive force.
The second element was his understanding of the need for priorities. Eisenhower had to worry first about attacks from the Soviet Union. The Korean armistice (although without a treaty ending the war) in July 1953 allowed for large reduction of U.S. forces with a continuing military presence to provide stability in a region that included the U.S. allies--South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan--in close proximity to the hostile North Korea, People’s Republic of China, and Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Eisenhower worried about Marxist terrorists and guerrillas attempting to gain control of Third World countries such as Guatemala, Indo-China, and Indonesia. Suicide squads rather than missile attacks will be the new president’s first concern in 2009. His strategy, accordingly, will have to include intelligence gathering and, in addition to patient diplomacy, a capacity for quick direct action. Such a strategy also will require, through military assistance and gradual withdrawal of American troops, creation of a secure, self-sufficient, and peaceful Iraq that can protect itself from depredations by both extremist groups and hostile neighbors. At the same time, the new president, working with NATO allies and Pakistan, will need to build a stable and independent government in Afghanistan, one that will undertake the measures of economic development and security necessary for elimination of terrorist training camps. He also will need to employ multi-lateral diplomatic initiatives to reduce threats from North Korea, Iran, and, perhaps, since its invasion of neighboring Georgia, a newly-assertive Russian Federation.
The third and final element the new president should consider is Eisenhower’s method of formulating strategy. The newly inaugurated commander-in-chief, whether McCain or Obama, in the first months after taking office or earlier, might gather a group of the nation’s most knowledgeable, imaginative, non-partisan, and experienced national security professionals—today’s counterparts of George F. Kennan and the Solarium participants— to a national security study and planning workshop to devise the twenty-first-century equivalent of Eisenhower’s approach to the Cold War.
[End]
[1] Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10 (
[2]Robert H. Reid, “Al Qaida Leader Dies,”
[3] David Fraser, Alanbrooke (London, 1982) in Gordon A. Craig, “The Political Leader as Strategist,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 481.
[4] Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79.
[5] Bowie and Immerman, 3.
[6] David von Drehle, “Does Experience Matter in a President?” Time, March 10, 2008: 26-30; Evan Thomas, “What These Eyes Have Seen,” Newsweek, Feb. 11, 2008: 30-31.
[7] Fareed Zakaria, “We Need a Wartime President,” Newsweek, July 14, 2008: 50.
[8] Ryan Lizza, “On the Bus: Can John McCain Reinvent Republicanism,” New Yorker, February 25, 2008: 35.
[9] http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html; David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 331-332.
[10]This included both insurgents and innocent civilians. Estimates of the war’s financial burden by 2008 had reached over a trillion dollars and slow political and economic progress tied down over 140,000 American troops. http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0310/p16s01-wmgn.html
[11] “A Special Report on
[12] John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, revised and expanded edition (
[13] Michiko Kakutani, “Who’s Your Daddy,” NYT, 2-1-08, B33—her review of Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (
[14] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 115-134.
[15] Paul Dixon, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Berkeley Books, 2001), 108-133; William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair,” in J. Garry Clifford and Theodore A. Wilson, eds., Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals: Essays Honoring Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 137-153; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 612-613; Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 171; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 164-165.
[16] It had 18,638 nuclear weapons by 1961, along with 1,300 intercontinental bombers and 3,000 missiles capable of delivering them to the Soviet Union or other parts of the world. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Touchstone), 562, 570.
[17] Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, 469-473.
[18] For perceptive appraisals of Eisenhower’s national security affairs, see Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 100, 161-162; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (
[19] Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), 36, 42.
[20] William Bragg Ewald, Jr., Eisenhower the President: Crucial Days, 1951-1960 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1981), 293-294.
[21] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 121-138, 170.
[22] Robert Timberg, John McCain: An American Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1999): 130.
[23] Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Books): 74.
[24]Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease with Ike (New York: Avon Books, 1967): 184.
[25] William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (
[26] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 185, xvi.
[27] Perry, 400.
[28] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 128-129.
[29] Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, “Effective National Security Advising: Recovering the Eisenhower Legacy,” Political Science Quarterly 115 (November 3, 2000): 342.
[30] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948), 36.
[31] William B. Pickett, “The Eisenhower Solarium Notes,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Newsletter 16, no. 2 (June 1985) .
[32]In summer of 1985, a package of registered mail arrived at my door from the Eisenhower Library. It contained several hundred photocopied pages newly declassified from Top Secret which I had requested via the Freedom of Information Act two years earlier while doing research on a biography of Eisenhower. The package contained notes of Eisenhower’s Solarium strategy workshop held in May and June, 1953. As I read the notes--which I soon summarized in an article published in The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations--I discovered to my amazement that none other than George F. Kennan, now retired from public service, had been a key participant, the leader of the group whose recommendations became the core of Eisenhower’s revision of Truman’s strategy. In 1988 and again in 2004, two scholarly conferences in which I participated at Princeton University discussed the Solarium workshop, its results, and Kennan’s participation. The first of these, the John Foster Dulles Centennial Conference, included a session featuring three officials--Kennan, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, and Robert R. Bowie--who had either participated in the Solarium workshop and/or in implementing the strategy that resulted from it. The published oral history transcript of that session, which I edited as a monograph, was available to the attendees at the second conference, the Kennan Centennial in 2004.
William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (
[33] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 2:440-41; Pickett, George F. Kennan, 3-4.
[34] Pickett, George F. Kennan, 5.
[36] http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
[37] The 9-11 Commission Report. Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 170-171, 374-375;
[38] James Jay Carafano and Paul Rosenzweig, Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War on Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom (
[39] Brian Grow, Keith Epstein, and Chi-Chu schang, “The New Espionage Threat,” BusinessWeek, April 21, 2008: 033-041.
[40] http://www.peopletopeople.com/peopletopeople/aboutus.aspx.
[41]Sageman, 41-42.
[42]William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower as Student of Clausewitz,” Military Review, Vol. LXV (July 1985); William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower, Clausewitz, and American Power,” The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter, Vol. 23, December 1991.
[43] Martin J. Medhurst, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Strategic Communicator (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 12; Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run, 37.
[44] Craig, 159-162.
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