1952 & 2004: From Doctrines to Policy

The "professional" media seems to be mired in Vietnam trivia, forgeries, shoddy reporting, and outright lies. Fortunately, we aren't "professionals" - so we can still bring you quality stuff.

Yesterday, our special analysis discussed the broad outlines of America's changed foreign policy since 9/11, and noted that the 2004 election may be about "The Bush Doctrine's" continuation or abandonment. We use the word "may" because we have some history for you. Specifically, 1947-1952, when The Truman Doctrine and "containment" were very controversial. Norman Podhoretz explains:

"When the Truman Doctrine was enunciated in 1947, it was attacked from several different directions. On the Right, there were the isolationists.... Their complaint was that Truman had committed the United States to endless interventions that had no clear bearing on our national interest. But there was also another faction on the Right that denounced containment not as recklessly ambitious but as too timid....

At the other end of the political spectrum, there were the Communists and their "liberal" fellow travelers who - strengthened by our alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II - had emerged as a relatively sizable group.... In their view, the Soviets had more cause to defend themselves against us than we had to defend ourselves against them, and it was Truman, not Stalin, who posed the greater danger to "free peoples everywhere."

....In the election of 1948, Truman had the seemingly impossible task of confronting all three of these challenges (and a few others as well). When, against what every poll had predicted, he succeeded in warding them off, he could reasonably claim a mandate for his foreign policy.... Even so, enough bitter opposition remained within and around the Republican party to leave it uncertain as to whether containment was an American policy or only the policy of the Democrats.

This uncertainty was exacerbated by the presidential election of 1952, when the Republicans behind Dwight D. Eisenhower ran against Truman's hand-picked successor Adlai Stevenson in a campaign featuring strident attacks on the Truman Doctrine by Eisenhower's running mate Richard Nixon and his future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Nixon, for example, mocked Stevenson as a graduate of the "Cowardly College of Communist Containment" run by Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, while Dulles repeatedly called for ditching containment in favor of a policy of "rollback" and "liberation." And both Nixon and Dulles strongly signaled their endorsement of General Douglas MacArthur’s insistence that Truman was wrong to settle for holding the line in Korea instead of going all the way—or, as MacArthur had famously put it, "There is no substitute for victory."

Yet when Eisenhower came into office, he hardly touched a hair on the head of the Truman Doctrine...."

The rest of Podhoretz' article explains why he doesn't think we're likely to face the same happy outcome in 2004, and it's definitely worth reading if you have some time. Even though I had seen and even blogged much of the material he cites, I must say that seeing it all in one place made for depressing reading.

Podhoretz hopes that if the Democrats win we'll get a replay of 1952, and that his prediction about their abandonment of The Bush Doctrine will be proved wrong. My prayer is slightly different.

I pray that his proposition will not be tested until his prediction is certain to be wrong, or until the Democratic Party puts forward a better framework for addressing a future of terrorism, proliferation, and Wretchard's Damoclean 3 Conjectures. Returning to the approaches whose egregious failure was chillingly revealed on Sept. 11, 2001 just isn't going to cut it.