In critique of the George W. Bush administration, and in praise of the perceived foreign-policy restraint of Obama\u2019s first five years in the White House, a persistent myth has arisen that ![\"WAR](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/481px-General_Dwight_D._Eisenhower.jpg?resize=240%2C300&ssl=1\")
Obama is reminiscent of Eisenhower \u2014 in the sense of being a president who kept America out of other nations\u2019 affairs and did not waste blood and treasure chasing imaginary enemies.<\/p>\n
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Andrew Bacevich, Fareed Zakaria (\u201cWhy Barack Is like Ike\u201d<\/a>), and a host of others have made such romantic, but quite misleading, arguments about the good old days under the man they consider the last good Republican president.<\/p>\n Ike was no doubt a superb president. Yet while he could be sober and judicious in deploying American forces abroad, he was hardly the non-interventionist of our present fantasies, who is so frequently used and abused to score partisan political points.<\/p>\n There is a strange disconnect about Eisenhower\u2019s supposed policy of restraint, especially in reference to the Middle East, and his liberal use of the CIA in covert operations. While romanticizing Ike, we often deplore the 1953 coup in Iran and the role of the CIA, but seem to forget that it was Ike who ordered the CIA intervention that helped to lead to the ouster of Mossadegh and to bring the Shah to absolute power. Ike thought that he saw threats to Western oil supplies, believed that Mossadegh was both unstable and a closet Communist, sensed the covert hand of the Soviet Union at work, was won over by the arguments of British oil politics, and therefore simply decided Mossadegh should go \u2014 and he did.<\/p>\n Ike likewise ordered the CIA-orchestrated removal of the leaders of Guatemala and the Congo. He bequeathed to JFK the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which had been born on the former\u2019s watch. His bare-faced lie that a U-2 spy plane had not been shot down in Russia did terrible damage to U.S. credibility at the time.<\/p>\n The Eisenhower administration formulated the domino theory, and Ike was quite logically the first U.S. president to insert American advisers into Southeast Asia, a move followed by a formal SEATO defense treaty to protect most of Southeast Asia from Communist aggression \u2014 one of the most interventionist commitments of the entire Cold War, which ended with over 58,000 Americans dead in Vietnam and helicopters fleeing from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.<\/p>\n Eisenhower\u2019s \u201cNew Look\u201d foreign policy of placing greater reliance on threats to use nuclear weapons, unleashing the CIA, and crafting new entangling alliances may have fulfilled its short-term aims of curbing the politically unpopular and costly use of conventional American troops overseas. Its long-term ramifications, however, became all too clear in the 1960s and 1970s. Mostly, Ike turned to reliance on nuke-rattling because of campaign promises to curb spending and balance the budget by cutting conventional defense forces \u2014 which earned him the furor of Generals Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and Matthew Ridgway.<\/p>\n In many ways, Eisenhower\u2019s Mideast policy lapsed into incoherency, notably in the loud condemnation of the 1956 British-French operations in Suez (after Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal), which otherwise might have weakened or toppled Nasser. This stance of Eisenhower\u2019s (who was up for reelection) may have also contradicted prior tacit assurances to the British that the U.S. would in fact look the other way.<\/p>\n The unexpected American opposition eroded transatlantic relations for years as well as helped to topple the Eden government in Britain. Somehow all at once the U.S. found itself humiliating its two closest allies, empowering Nasser, and throwing its lot in with the Soviet Union and the oil blackmailers of Saudi Arabia \u2014 with ramifications for the ensuing decades.<\/p>\n Yet just two years later, Ike ordered 15,000 troops into Lebanon to prevent a coup and the establishment of an anti-Western government \u2014 precisely those anti-American forces that had been emboldened by the recent Suez victory of the pan-Arabist Nasser. We forget that Ike was nominated not just in opposition to the non-interventionist policies of Robert Taft, but also as an antidote to the purportedly milk-toast Truman administration, which had supposedly failed to confront global Communism and thereby \u201clost\u201d much of Asia.<\/p>\n Eisenhower gave wonderful speeches about the need to curtail costly conventional forces and to avoid overseas commitments, but much of his defense strategy was predicated on a certain inflexible and dangerous reliance on nuclear brinksmanship. In 1952 he ran to the right of the departing Harry Truman on the Korean War, and unleashed Nixon to make the argument of Democratic neo-appeasement in failing to get China out of Korea. Yet when he assumed office, Eisenhower soon learned that hinting at the use of nuclear weapons did not change the deadlock near the 38th Parallel. Over 3,400 casualties (including perhaps over 800 dead) were incurred during the Eisenhower administration\u2019s first six months. Yet the July 1953 ceasefire ended the war with roughly the same battlefield positions as when Ike entered office. Pork Chop Hill \u2014 long before John Kerry\u2019s baleful notion about the last man to die in Vietnam \u2014 became emblematic of a futile battle on the eve of a negotiated stalemate.<\/p>\n Ike\u2019s occasional opportunism certainly turned off more gifted field generals like Matthew Ridgway, who found it ironic that candidate Ike had cited a lack of American resolve to finish the Korean War with an American victory, only to institutionalize Ridgway\u2019s much-criticized but understandable restraint after his near-miraculous restoration of South Korea. In addition, Ridgway deplored the dangerous false economy of believing that postwar conventional forces could be pruned while the U.S. could rely instead on threatening the\u00a0use of nuclear weapons. He almost alone foresaw rightly that an emerging concept of mutually assured destruction would make the conventional Army and Marines as essential as ever.<\/p>\n As a footnote, Eisenhower helped to marginalize the career of Ridgway, the most gifted U.S. battlefield commander of his era. Ike bore grudges and was petty enough to write, quite untruthfully, that General James Van Fleet, not Ridgway, had recaptured Seoul \u2014 even though the former had not even yet arrived in the Korean theater. That unnecessary snub was reminiscent of another to his former patron George Marshall during the campaign of 1952. Ridgway, remember, would later talk Eisenhower out of putting more advisers into Vietnam.<\/p>\n The problem with the Obama administration is not that it does or does not intervene, given the differing contours of each crisis, but rather that it persists in giving loud sermons that bear no relationship to the actions that do or do not follow: red lines in Syria followed by Hamlet-like deliberations and acceptance of Putin\u2019s bogus WMD removal plan; flip-flop-flip in Egypt; in Libya, lead from behind followed by Benghazi and chaos; deadlines and sanctions to no deadlines and no sanctions with Iran; reset reset with Russia; constant public scapegoating of his predecessors, especially Bush; missile defense and then no missile defense in Eastern Europe; Guantanamo, renditions, drones, and preventive detentions all bad in 2008 and apparently essential in 2009; civilian trials for terrorists and then not; and Orwellian new terms like overseas contingency operations, workplace violence, man-caused disasters, a secular Muslim Brotherhood, jihad as a personal journey, and a chief NASA mission being outreach to Muslims. We forget that the non-interventionist policies of Jimmy Carter abruptly ended with his bellicose \u201cCarter Doctrine\u201d \u2014 birthed after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, American hostages were taken in Tehran and Khomeinists had taken power, China went into Vietnam, and Communist insurgencies swept Central America.<\/p>\n As for Dwight Eisenhower, of course he was an admirable and successful president who squared the circle of trying to contain expansionary Soviet and Chinese Communism at a time when the postwar American public was rightly tired of war, while balancing three budgets, building infrastructure, attempting to deal with civil rights, and promoting economic growth. Yet the Republican Ike continued for six months the identical Korean War policies of his unpopular Democratic predecessor Harry Truman, and helped to lay the foundation for the Vietnam interventions of his successors, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. That the initial blow-ups in Korea and Vietnam bookended his own administration may have been a matter of luck, given his own similar interventionist Cold War policies.<\/p>\n Bush was probably no Ike (few are), and certainly Obama is not either. But to score contemporary political points against one and for the other by reinventing Eisenhower into a model non-interventionist is a complete distortion of history. So should we laugh or cry at the fantasies offered by Andrew Bacevich? He writes: \u201cRemember the disorder that followed the Korean War? It was called the Eisenhower era, when budgets balanced, jobs were plentiful and no American soldiers died in needless wars.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, the post\u2013Korean War \u201cEisenhower era\u201d was characterized by only three balanced budgets (in at least one case with some budget gimmickry) out of the remaining seven Eisenhower years. In 1958 the unemployment rate spiked at over 7 percent for a steady six months. Bacevich\u2019s simplistic notion that \u201cjobs were plentiful\u201d best applies to the first six months of 1953, when Ike entered office and, for the only time during his entire tenure, the jobless rate was below 3 percent \u2014 coinciding roughly with the last six months of fighting the Korean War. This was an age, remember, when we had not yet seen the West German, South Korean, and Japanese democratic and economic miracles (all eventually due to U.S. interventions and occupations), China and Russia were in ruins, Western Europe was still recovering from the war, Britain had gone on a nationalizing binge, and for a brief time the U.S. was largely resupplying the world, and mostly alone \u2014 almost entirely with its own oil, gas, and coal. Eisenhower\u2019s term was characterized by intervention in Lebanon, fighting for stalemate in Korea, CIA-led coups and assassinations, the insertion of military advisers into Vietnam, new anti-Communist treaty entanglements to protect Southeast Asian countries, a complete falling out with our European allies, abject lies about spy flights over the Soviet Union, serial nuclear saber-rattling, and Curtis LeMay\u2019s nuclear-armed overflights of the Soviet Union \u2014 in other words, the not-so-abnormal stuff of a Cold War presidency.<\/p>\n And the idea that, to quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eisenhower \u201ccould then take enormous pride in the fact that not a single soldier had died in combat during his time\u201d is, well, unhinged.<\/p>\n NRO\u00a0contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the\u00a0<\/em>Hoover Institution<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and the author, most recently, of<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Obama admirers have created a complete distortion of “the Eisenhower era.” by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 In critique of the George W. Bush administration, and in praise of the perceived foreign-policy restraint of Obama\u2019s first five years in the White House, a persistent myth has arisen that Obama is reminiscent of Eisenhower \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[99,196],"tags":[12,51,448,1055,1028,527],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1QE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3165,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/campaign-rhetoric-and-presidential-reality-a-brief-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":7108,"position":0},"title":"Campaign Rhetoric and Presidential Reality: A Brief History","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services American presidential election rhetoric always paints the incumbent as incompetent in foreign policy, the challenger insightful and skillful. A look at recent history, however, shows that once the opposition gains office, the world suddenly becomes not so black and white. The outsider Dwight\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2008"","block_context":{"text":"December 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/december-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7254,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/foreign-policy-from-bad-to-none\/","url_meta":{"origin":7108,"position":1},"title":"Foreign Policy: From Bad to None","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Our enemies are gloating, and our allies are grimly deciding where to go from here. by Victor Davis Hanson Barack Obama had a foreign policy for about five years, and now he has none. The first-term foreign policy\u2019s assumptions went something like this. Obama was to assure the world that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Foreign Policy"","block_context":{"text":"Foreign Policy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/foreign-policy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2941,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-audacity-of-irony\/","url_meta":{"origin":7108,"position":2},"title":"The Audacity of Irony","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Hope and change\" meet reality. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We have seen irony before, when the moralist Jimmy Carter chastised us with sermons about our paranoid, inordinate fear of Communism and our amoral unconcern with human rights, even as the dividends of his policies were the Soviets\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7521,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-future-is-1979\/","url_meta":{"origin":7108,"position":3},"title":"Our Future Is 1979","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama\u2019s foreign-policy weakness encourages our enemies and disheartens our allies.\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. 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