Trump is no Truman
When Harry Truman became president, he had no foreign policy experience. As a two-term Missouri senator, Truman was the compromise choice as Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1944 election.
With FDR’s death on April 12, 1945, Truman stepped from the wings to center stage. In the course of the next eight years (he was elected on his own in 1948), Truman made some of the most consequential decisions in the history of American foreign policy.
To name a few: Breaking with a century-and-half of isolationist tradition and extending financial and military assistance to Greece and Turkey (which were being menaced by communist insurgents). Creating, selling and implementing the Marshall Plan. Launching NATO. Recognizing Israel. Going to war in Korea.
The current president, Donald Trump, took up residence in the White House without foreign policy experience, just like Truman. The Trump presidency is 16 months old, and except for success against ISIS, the most we can say is that he’s still president.
Oh, and he’s in the process of “securing” the border with Mexico against a fearsome “caravan” of a thousand foot-sore, hungry Hondurans, including an estimated 300 children and 400 women.
Trump is sending National Guardsmen to the border to save the country from these really, really bad people, probably drug smugglers and murderers and rapists.
(Turns out it’s easier for the president to call up troops than to construct “a great big, beautiful wall.” Even one we pay for ourselves.)
Also: Trump has invited his Russian counterpart, president Vladimir Putin, to visit the White House.
This is the same Putin, mind you, that U.S. government intelligence agencies charge with hacking the 2016 election, in the most blatant attempt by any foreign power to undermine the jewel of American democracy.
We can only hope Putin puts in an appearance in the Oval Office, say, during the second or third week of October, in time for this year’s congressional elections. It would be great to see old Vlad on the White House red carpet, just as Trump’s fellow citizens are going to the polls.
A State Department veteran, George Kennan, laid the foundations for Truman’s post-war foreign policy in February 1946. Kennan wrote what became known as the Long Telegram, a 5,326-word essay that established the parameters of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union that long outlasted the Truman presidency.
In these times, when Putin seems to be on something of a rampage, what with poisonings in the UK and his continued meddling in U.S. politics, it might be useful to see what Kennan had to say. It turns out he was remarkably prescient not only about the late 1940s but about our era as well.
Kennan was a student of Russian history. He saw through the communist veneer to the fundamentals of Russia’s relations with the outside world.
In Kennan’s view, Marxist ideology was a “fig leaf” obscuring a “long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced (the) country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee (the) external security of their internally weak regimes.”
The men in the Kremlin, Kennan wrote, constituted “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent” settlement of differences.
The autocrats in charge of Russia in 1946, Kennan said, believed that it was “desirable and necessary that the internal harmony” of U.S. “society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”
Benn Steil, a foreign policy scholar, writes in his new book “The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War” that Kennan’s missive “offered a sense of epiphany” to Truman and his foreign affairs team. The Long Telegram unraveled “a great and important mystery … Russia was implacably hostile to American interests.”
Under Putin, that sadly still seems to be the case. Washington needs another “epiphany.” Too bad for us: Trump is no Truman.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.