In addition to the day job,
the blog, the Marketplace commentaries and the occasional essay for
Newsweek International, I'm pleased to announce that I am now a Senior Editor for
The National Interest -- see,
it's on the masthead and everything.
This (not coincidentaly) coincides with the first issue of TNI to be printed under the aegis of new editor-in-chief
Justine Rosenthal, who is the most dangerous kind of editor -- the kind who can get me to say yes to stuff. I mean, there are limits -- if she asked me to write an essay about how Bono is his own superpower, I probably wouldn't do it.
Oh, wait....
Personal biases aside,
go check out the latest issue, which is rich with interesting content:
a realist/neocon debate between Stephen Walt and Joshua Muravchik, a
review essay on Iraq books by one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors on Iraq, and
Leslie Gelb's argument for the small-r realists of America to unite.
My favorite essay in this issue, however, is longtime friend-of-danieldrezner.com
Amy Zegart's article on George W. Bush's foreign policy legacy. As much as the Bush administration likes to believes that, over time, they will be viewed like he Truman administration, Zegart sets the historical record straight:
Harry Truman’s presidency illustrates the lasting impact of first impressions. For many Bush officials, Truman is a comforting role model—another wildly unpopular wartime leader who aimed big and is now viewed as one of the presidential greats. As Rice reflected, “When you’re at the beginning of a big historical transformation, it doesn’t look like you’re doing much right.” Bush himself invoked Truman at his 2006 West Point graduation speech, comparing the struggle against Communism to the war against Islamic radicalism and noting that “Like Americans in Truman’s day, we are laying the foundations for victory.” No one disputes that Bush’s aims are sweeping or that, like Truman, he seeks to transform international relations for a new enemy in a new era. Bush’s second inaugural proclaimed American foreign policy to be nothing less than spreading “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” The difficulty of the task, he said, “is no excuse for avoiding it.” Ending tyranny would be “the concentrated work of generations.” As Rice noted, the president does not just defend the status quo.
When it comes to vindication, however, the Truman parallels fall short. History’s judgment of Harry Truman came early, not late. His greatest cold-war policies were recognized as triumphs from the start, and his failures remain failures to this day. Truman’s March 1947 containment speech to Congress was met with a standing ovation and press reports that instantly hailed it as a historic landmark in U.S. foreign policy. His European economic-recovery program, the Marshall Plan, also attracted widespread public support (thanks in large part to the administration’s own public-relations campaign) and produced impressive and fast results. In 1953, just five years after it began, the Marshall Plan formally ended, Europe was well on its way to economic recovery and Secretary of State George Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. At the same time, history has not reversed judgment about Truman’s foreign-policy failures. Nixon may have opened China, but Truman still lost it. For starving North Koreans or anyone who worries about Kim Jong-il’s nuclear weapons and crackpot tendencies, the Korean War is still searching for a happy ending.
Truman, like Bush, did face stormy opposition and plummeting public approval during his presidency. But his low popularity had many causes, and foreign policy was not the primary one. Postwar economic reconversion, high taxes, government spending, labor disputes, the firing of General Douglas MacArthur, the anti-Communist hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy and salacious corruption scandals including influence peddling with fur coats and deep freezers all helped to sour the public’s mood by 1952. In January, Truman’s public disapproval hit a whopping 67 percent, a record surpassed only by the current president. Notably, the same poll asked Americans what they believed were the most important issues in the 1952 presidential election. More said government waste and corruption than the Korean War. Republican Party leaders agreed, ranking corruption and wasteful government spending their top two campaign issues by overwhelming margins in a November 1951 Gallup poll. The Korean War ranked a distant fourth (behind taxes), and other foreign issues were even lower. Domestic policy, not foreign policy, was the administration’s greatest weakness and the Republicans’ best hope. Combating the “mess in Washington” became one of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s central campaign themes. The Republican presidential nominee made headlines and scored one of the biggest ovations of the campaign when he assailed the Truman administration as “barefaced looters” during an Indianapolis stump speech. The notion that Truman was drummed out of office for foreign-policy failures that were subsequently judged successes might be comforting, but it is not correct.
Again,
go check it all out.
[
Wait, if you're a senior editor, what am I?--ed. You're the person who should remind me to
link to this essay as well.
Damn straight!--ed.]
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