LIKE THE COLD WAR, the War on Terror is being defined even as it is fought, by a president who didn’t expect it. In 1945, Harry Truman finished a hot war and stepped into a postwar world that seemed stable and certified: The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, the victorious Big Five of the World War II coalition, would keep order together through the United Nations, designed as their hand-crafted instrument. In 2001, George W. Bush stepped into a world in which history itself was believed to have ended, the United States was secure as the sole superpower, and the peace disturbed only by unconnected and regional quarrels. Neither man was known for his passionate interest in world affairs or grand strategy. Yet Truman ended up as the conceptualizer of the Cold War, the president who set American foreign policy on the path it would follow for the next half-century. And Bush now bids fair to do the same for the War on Terror. For Truman, the moment of truth was more subtle than September 11–intense Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey, and Britain’s announcement that it could not guarantee their security. On March 12, 1947, Truman went before Congress to ask for $400 million in aid to those countries, and pledged to confront Russian expansionism wherever it arose. On September 20, 2001, Bush went before Congress promising to avenge the terrorists’ carnage, and pledging to confront terrorists wherever they might be. Six weeks later, he launched his campaign in Afghanistan. Both men soon sought to give institutional form to their new policies. In June 1947, the Truman administration unveiled the Marshall Plan; the following month, Congress passed the National Security Act, which combined all the military services in the Defense Department, set up the new CIA, and created the National Security Council to give expert advice to the president. On June 12, 2002, Bush asked Congress to create a new Department of Homeland Security, to combine all or part of 22 different federal agencies, to merge the intelligence gathering capabilities of the CIA and FBI, to allot $1.6 billion to the states to prepare against possible future emergencies, and $4.3 billion for drugs, vaccines, and other safeguards against a potential bioterrorist onslaught. To cope with a different and new kind of menace, Truman adopted the theme of containment, based on the idea that the Communists, while aggressive and ruthless, had no great desire to murder Americans, had no interest in seeing their people and countries demolished, and could therefore be deterred from expansion by persistent and credible threats. To cope with a different and new kind of menace, Bush is elaborating a preemption doctrine, based on the belief that terrorists are ruthless and also have a lively desire to murder Americans, have no concern for the welfare of the states they work out of, and subscribe to a death cult in which murderous martyrdom is the highest good. “Deterrence–the promise of massive retaliation–means nothing against the shadowy terrorist networks with no nations or citizens,” Bush said on June 1. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles. . . . The war on terrorism cannot be won on the defensive. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Truman began 1946 concentrating on Greece and Turkey. He then moved throughout the year after to make himself the protector of the entire non-Communist world. The Marshall Plan, which addressed Western Europe, was proposed in June, and passed six months later. In June 1948, he reacted to the Russian blockade of Berlin by beginning an airlift that saved the city. It was this event, and Communist coups soon after in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary, that spurred the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed April 4, 1949. That same year, the administration drafted the strategy document known as National Security Council Report 68, a long-term plan for a very long and grim conflict, that assessed the Communist threat to the world and laid out a grand strategy able to fight it. In time, in the words of Paul Johnson, “it produced specific alliances or agreed obligations to 47 nations and led American forces to build up or occupy 675 bases and station a million troops overseas.” Like Truman, Bush began moving out into global commitments in the first months of 2002. In his State of the Union address on January 29, he extended his focus out from the Taliban and into Iran and Iraq. In May, he signed an arms pact with Russia and declared an end to the era of great power conflicts (to free them to battle the small, nasty movements). On June 1, in a commencement address at West Point, he announced his preemption doctrine and declared his intention to push for democratic reform in the Islamic world. Truman and the men around him had come to realize that the world and their country could know no real security unless they stabilized Asia and Europe, by bringing democracy to Germany and Japan, which had no prior record of popular governance. Bush and his people have now come to realize that their world and country can have no real security unless the Middle East can be stabilized, by encouraging democratic reforms in Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian entity, which have no prior record of popular governance. “The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America, and the entire Islamic world,” said Bush on June 1. “The people of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as the people in every nation, and their governments should listen to their hopes.” Both Bush and Truman had to wage conflicts in which concepts of war were remade. Truman’s war was against both traditional Russian expansionism and a radical movement that knew no national boundaries; a war of threats and rapprochements, in which American presidents walked a 50-year tightrope between risking Armageddon by being too aggressive, and inviting aggression by appearing too weak. America amassed a vast stockpile of terrible weapons, but the aim was never to use them. Great wars usually inflict great pain on their people; during the Cold War, Americans lived better than ever before in their history; there was great suffering for some (in Korea and Vietnam), but most were untouched. The Cold War brought five decades of low-key anxiety, broken by moments of breath-holding terror. It was a war in which provocations were met by a wide range of responses, based on refined calculations. Truman chose to circumvent the blockade of Berlin, rather than force a direct confrontation with Soviet power. Kennedy let the Berlin Wall rise without incident, but was prepared to face war over missiles in Cuba. In the early years of the Cold War, “liberationists” decried the containment doctrine as being too passive. But it was Ronald Reagan, a liberationist by temperament, who finally won it, by his aggressive use of containment tactics–economic, psychological, and political warfare, first recommended back in 1946. Bush’s first year of war has already been hotter than Truman’s, and looks to become hotter still. But it has the same mixture of multiple weapons, on the military, economic, intelligence, and diplomatic fronts. It has the same (seemingly) on-and-off nature, and the same unequal distribution of sacrifice. (After the attacks, people were urged to go out and buy things: “Ask how much you can spend for your country,” as JFK might have said.) In World War II, success was defined in terms of ground taken, and ended in formal surrenders. In the Cold War, success was determined as what failed to happen: the bombs that weren’t dropped, the guns that weren’t fired, the incursions and coups that never took place. Success in this war is defined by attacks that don’t happen, whose numbers we may never know. In both wars, private vulnerability seemed to increase in direct proportion to national power. “The events of 1947-1950 changed Americans’ view of their place in the world forever,” writes Michael Barone in “Our Country.” “Before WWII, their country had been physically invulnerable but militarily weak. After victory in WWII and the emergence of the Cold War, Americans had a country which was militarily strong, but for the first time, they realized with a sinking feeling, also physically vulnerable.” In the Cold War, we were one of two superpowers, but open for the first time to attack via missile. Now, we are the world’s sole superpower, and our people have never been in more danger at home. If the Cold War differed from most wars before it, the new war is different again. In the Cold War, we faced an empire that wanted more land and power, but had no intrinsic, discernible bloodlust. Now, we face a movement that seeks psychological dominance, and is hungry for blood. Then, we faced a large bloc of countries whose influence had to be contained. Now we face not a state, but a transnational network with no fixed address, a vine to be ripped up in numerous countries, while leaving those countries (in most cases) as unharmed as possible. Then, we faced a bloc of nations with vast armies and arsenals. Now, we face a transient force, with a great deal less power, but with weapons of frightening virulence. The immense damage incurred on September 11 cost the perpetrators barely the price of one tank. THE FIRST YEAR of this war often seemed confused and confusing. So did the Cold War. The early years of the Cold War (the late years, too, for that matter) were ugly and partisan. There were also the normal mistakes. “The Truman reorganization was far from the simple and solid success that many now assume,” writes Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post. “It failed to accomplish much that Harry Truman had hoped for, and it set the stage for much that he never anticipated. . . . Its success was greatly circumscribed by parochialism, pettiness, and personality. . . . Its first iteration, in 1947. . . was such a disaster that it had to be redrawn two years later–and was still being amended 37 years after that.” Likewise, the development of the new Department of Homeland Security has been beset by wranglings, complicated by the fact that most of its duties–securing bridges, tunnels, and nuclear plants against possible assault by terrorists; procuring vaccines, drawing up plans against poison gas and deadly diseases–are themselves new and different. Authorities were slow off the mark in diagnosing the anthrax attacks of last autumn; most American doctors had never seen anthrax. Americans slipped up somewhat in letting terrorists slip through the border to Pakistan; next time they’ll know better. The Wise Men themselves had made numerous errors. Their grand plan of aiding regimes under Communist pressure was most successful, from its first great triumphs in Greece and Turkey in 1947 to its last in Nicaragua some four decades later. But there were disasters along the way–as in Vietnam, when the regime being pressured was too inept, too corrupt, or too justly unpopular to use their aid properly. Still, the blunders did not prevent the eventual triumph. In this context, one of Bush’s big problems may be in reminding us that this really is war. It does not, as some say, “feel like a war,” but this is what modern war feels like. It is episodic, off-center, and often invisible, but it is also dangerous and deadly. “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, and the international authority of our state be broken,” as George Kennan, the great theorist of containment, once said. This new war, like the Cold War, requires a new vocabulary to convey its reality. The color-coded threat levels of the new homeland security apparatus, the reds and oranges and yellows, have been much derided. But something like them is necessary and will come to seem as unremarkable as the jargon of the Cold War–massive retaliation, mutually assured destruction–now seems. The Cold War brought us the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO and SHAPE, containment, deterrence, and an alliance of the United States with its former enemies–Japan, Germany, and Italy–against its former allies, Russia and China. The new war has brought us (so far) the Bush Doctrine, preemption, regime change (making war on rulers, but not on a people or country), and a new set of alliances including, once again, between the United States and Russia (or at least between Putin and Bush). Truman urged the non-Communist world to recognize a threat that had split the United Nations, and to form structures outside to contain it. Bush is now asking the United Nations to save itself, by mobilizing under U.S. leadership against a menace that transcends the traditional national structure. “By defining the challenge as of a magnitude requiring cooperative action by the world community, Bush has affirmed America’s commitment to a new world order,” writes Henry Kissinger, one more sweeping than the Cold War order. But whether the patrolling is done by a new, revised post-Cold War United Nations, or a more NATO-like bloc of the United States, Britain, and possibly Russia, it will be a protracted and painstaking struggle. Dean Acheson, whose memoir “Present at the Creation” described the order that he, Kennan, and Truman established, gave this description of the first years of their struggle (as quoted by his biographer James Chace): The problems, he said, were not like headaches–“take a powder and they are gone. They are like the pains of earning a living. . . . All our lives, the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline, will be upon us. . . . They will stay with us until death.” SEVERAL PRESIDENTS have had to wage wars, but only two, Bush and Truman, have had to perceive them, and then to define them as wars. In 1946 Truman was faced by a specific event: the declaration by Britain that it could not protect Greece and Turkey. He might have said he was stepping in to take Britain’s place in this one instance. He didn’t. Instead, he announced, in his great speech to Congress, that he intended to check the onslaught of Communist power, wherever it rose up on Earth. On September 11, Bush was faced by a specific event, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. He could have defined these as criminal acts and announced his intention to bring those who planned them to justice. He didn’t. Instead, he took the occasion of his great speech to Congress to declare a world war on terrorists, including the states who harbor and fund them. Each took a specific event and responded to it on the maximum level, extrapolating from and beyond it to a long-term commitment of national power. Each moved from a local event to a global crusade. Truman’s took 54 years. In the 20 years between the time that Vietnam turned rancid and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the end of 1989, it was said and written that Truman had been too expansive and bellicose, Kennedy far too grandiloquent in his promise to “pay any price,” and Reagan too blunt in his talk about “evil.” They took on too much, were unnuanced, had too great a belief in American power, and bit off far more than the country could swallow, the hubris that had met its nemesis in Vietnam. But Vietnam itself has been slipping from prominence, and increasingly looks like a shattering sideshow in the larger war. If the decades just after Vietnam seemed to show these men’s excesses, the years since 1989 have showed their strength and sound judgment. In “The Wise Men,” their multibiography of Acheson, Kennan, and four other cold warriors, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas deemed their work successful, in that they had “created an alliance that has securely preserved the West from aggression for onward of forty years.” This book was published in 1986. Five years later, it would be revealed that this was only a small part of the story; beyond saving the West, they had also in the long run freed Eastern Europe, and allowed even Russia to embark on a future which, if not quite yet flourishing, at least has the promise of becoming much better. They had won a world war. None of this at the time appeared certain or likely. If the hardest job of the 20th century went to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had to deal with both economic collapse and the worst war in history, the hardest decisions were left to Truman, who had to pick his own way through a nuclear landscape in a new kind of multi-hued struggle. There had been one way alone to respond to Pearl Harbor. There were many ways to respond to the slow accumulation of encroachments and incidents that made up the Soviet record at the end of 1946. Only one of these was to see them as an ominous and enlarging pattern, which demanded a global response. This decision, of course, was just the beginning: There was no easy way to explain to a country exhausted from four years of struggle that it needed to suit up again. Before September 11, the emerging progression of terrorist incidents had been carefully defined as criminal acts by the people in power, eager to avoid connecting the dots, or even to notice them. Bush connected these dots in a very few minutes, in the fierce light projected by jet fuel on fire. Such acts of cognition save people and nations. History, which these days looks kindly on Harry S. Truman, may one day look kindly on Bush. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
