# Posted 11:37 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BUSH=TRUMAN? That's the question of the moment. It's not a new idea, but it got a big push last week after Bill Safire mentioned the idea in a NYT op-ed and on Meet the Press while David Sanger wrote about the analogy in an article for the Week in Review.

Since there are twenty solid pages about Truman in my doctoral dissertation, I figure that I have a right to put my two cents in on this subect. But rather than taking a fresh cut at the subject, I'm going to respond to a post by John Ikenberry, a very respected scholar of international relations who has written a very well-regarded book that looks at Truman's foreign policy in some detail.

Ikenberry's post consists of 9 reasons why Bush doesn't come close to being Truman. I'll respond to those reasons one by one, but first I want to point out a pair of 800-pound gorillas missing from Ikenberry's post.

The first is Truman's unrelenting commitment to democracy promotion, best embodied by his remarkable commitment to the democratization of Germany and Japan. Frankly, it wouldn't've been hard for Ikenberry just to say that Truman did democracy promotion and did it right, since no Americans were killed by insurgents during the occupation of Germany and Japan.

But if you've read Ikenberry's big book, you'll know that he systematically avoids any identification of American foreign policy with the idea of democracy promotion, instead emphasizing multilateralism, multilateralism and more multilateralism. If Ikenberry recognized just how committed Truman really was to democracy promotion, he might not dismiss the analogy to Bush so lightly.

The second 800-pound gorrilla in the room is Korea. Ikenberry passionately wants to reclaim Truman's mantle for the Democratic party, yet seems unwilling to confront the fact that Truman sent 50,000 American soldiers to their deaths in what was once regarded as a quagmire and a war of choice, just like Iraq. In hindsight, historians have come to appraise the Korean War as a strategic victory in spite of the stalemate on the ground. But Ikenberry doesn't even touch that issue, since it provides a ready explanation for why one shouldn't judge this war to be a failure.

That said, here's the blow-by blow (with abbreviated quotations from Ikenberry's original post):

1. Truman responded to the threats of his era by building an expansive American-centered international order organized around a grand alliance of democracies and an array of global and regional economic, political, and security institutions. That's right. But neither here nor elsewhere does Ikenberry recognize the degree to which Europe's devastation and vulnerability to the Soviet threat made it amenable to American leadership.

2. Truman presided over the greatest expansion of American power in the country’s history – defined in terms of hard military power but also prestige, respect, credibility and the ready support of other countries. I agree. But once again, what about Korea? Fighting to a stalemate and losing 50,000 soldiers to the primitive Chinese armed forces didn't do much for Truman's prestige, respect or credibility, especially among liberals.

3. Truman presided over a massive expansion of pro-Americanism around the world. In Europe and Japan, yes. (But see #1 above.) With regard to the rest of the planet, there isn't much solid evidence about public opinion. And rememeber: both communism and the anti-Western variety of anti-colonialism made tremendous gains in this period.

4. Truman passed the test of leadership. In confronting the grave threat of Soviet communism he brought the "free world" together, bolstering America’s image by championing the establishment of the UN, NATO, and the Marshall Plan. Agreed. But again, see #1 above. NATO and the Marshall Plan are incomprehensible without reference to the Soviet threat. And the UN? Let's consider it's accomplishements during the Cold War...

5. Truman was a great champion of the United Nations. Ditto.

6. Truman tied the building of a liberal international order to a progressive domestic agenda. Well, that's pretty much the definition of being a liberal, so there's not much reason to expect that from Bush.

7. Truman fused realism with liberalism...Bush has fused realism with a nationalist conservativism. This point is somewhat confusing. Does nationalist conservatism favor building democracy in Iraq at the cost of American lives? No, but idealism does. Whether liberalism and idealism are one and the same is a whole 'nother issue...

8. Truman pursued a bipartisan foreign policy – eschewing the ideological extremes of the right or the left. There was a pretty solid bipartisan consensus during Truman's first term. As for avoiding the extremes, scholars spent the first forty years after Truman's presidency denouncing him as a reckless and/or extreme anti-Communist who paved the road to Korea and Vietnam with his good intentions or even provoked an unnecessary conflict with the Soviets. So it's sort of ironic for Ikenberry to lionize Truman now, with the benefit of hindsight.

9. Truman suffered assaults from right wing Republicans who questioned his toughness and patriotism. Yup. No question the McCarthy era was a low point for the dignity of the GOP. But perhaps Prof. Ikenberry should remind himself of what Henry Wallace and the rest of Howard Dean's ancestors were up to in the late 1940s.

So, Truman and Bush? We may have to wait forty years for an answer, the same way we did the first time around. (9) opinions -- Add your opinion