The War on Terror has spurred an entire industry of historical analogy, some of it purely rhetorical, but much of it central to formulating a strategy to defeat the jihadi threat to America and the world. The foundation of many of these analogies-which come from manifold political perspectives-is the presidency of Harry S Truman. On the left, Peter Beinart, Will Marshall and Richard Holbrooke, among others, see Truman as their North Star in these troubled times, guiding them back to the Promised Land. On the right, none other than President George W. Bush claims mastery over the Missourian's legacy (beyond the low approval rating and mediocre public speaking skills), carrying the anti-totalitarian torch into a new century.

Both left and right argue that the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO and NSC-68 followed a linear trajectory, reflecting a uniform grand strategy for confronting the Soviet Union dating back to March 1947. Holbrooke concurs, adding that this "nearly pitch-perfect" strategy "reached its apogee in June 1950, when Truman ordered U.S. forces to defend South Korea after the North Korean army crossed the 38^th parallel."[1] How do we resolve these conflicting claims to the Truman throne? For starters, this succession battle and the en vogue deification of Truman's presidency largely ignores the not-quite-dead 56-year-old elephant in the room-the Korean War-and its meaning today.

The Korean War marked a turning point in American Cold War strategy. Following the war's outbreak, Truman set the wheels in motion for the approval of NSC-68, the administration's grand strategy statement, and it became official policy on September 30. It defined the Cold War as a confrontation between the Soviet Union-the "slave state"-and the United States-the "free state." Despite its significance, today's Truman fan club treats the Korean War as though it were their icon's middle initial, standing for nothing. But the conflict matters, and its origins and impact on American strategy dispel the myths fueling current attempts at appropriating the Truman legacy.

Remembering the Forgotten War

As Truman told the American public in his 1953 farewell address, "Most important of all, we acted in Korea. The decision I believe was the most important in my time as president of the United States." The Korean War was a war of firsts, distinguishing itself from the 20^th century's two world wars and other modern conflicts through its symbolic, not strategic, underpinnings and its combination of the nuclear threat with limited warfare. Truman's initial response to the Korean War was both courageous and essential. Speaking on the 175^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he emphasized the Korean intervention's unique place in history. Lofty ideals, not strategic necessity, inspired U.S. intervention.  "Men of the armed forces in Korea . . . you are winning a greater thing than military victory, for you are vindicating the idea of freedom under international law. It is an achievement that may well prove to be a turning point in world history", Truman said. He was right.

Roughly three years earlier, Truman delivered his most famous speech to a joint session of Congress. The Truman Doctrine, however, did not distinguish the Soviet Union from previous totalitarian threats to global stability and was therefore not the diplomatic tour de force it is so often treated as.[2] As Truman said at a press conference in May 1947, "There isn't any difference in totalitarian states. I don't care what you call them-you call them Nazi, Communist or Fascist, or Franco, or anything else-they are all alike." Unlike George F. Kennan, who distinguished the Soviet Union from Hitlerite Germany in the Long Telegram, for Truman, the USSR paralleled previous totalitarian threats and could be dealt with similarly, negating the need to implement an innovative grand strategy.

The Historical Leap (of Faith)

So how does one construct the Truman legacy and identify the present incarnation of his ideals and leadership? That depends on your political affiliation.

For Beinart, Truman's foreign policy consisted of three principles: containment of the Soviet Union, domestic strength through "reconstruction" and self-restraint in wielding American power through multilateral institutions (specifically the United Nations and NATO). This three-pronged approach culminated in the approval of NSC-68 in September 1950. Given that Truman is a hero in Beinart's narrative, the Korean War's MIA status in his book is rather conspicuous.

George W. Bush, summarizing Truman's foreign policy at West Point's commencement on May 27, 2006, said: "President Truman made clear that the Cold War was an ideological struggle between tyranny and freedom. . . . [H]e issued a presidential directive called NSC-68, which declared that America faced an enemy ‘animated by a new fanatic faith' and determined to impose its ideology on the entire world." The Bush Doctrine, so the analogy goes, is today's blueprint for victory and the Truman Administration's ideological progeny.

The historical linearity of Bush and Beinart, however, doesn't accurately reflect the record. In fairness, many left-leaning analysts simply seek to connect themselves with an era when Democrats were strong on national security, and Truman's final term is a good choice. But by relying on historical analogy and cherry picking from history, convenience takes precedence over substantive strategic analysis.

In the late 1940s, America had policies designed to achieve specific goals in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. But those policies existed independently of global objectives, resulting in a piecemeal approach to the Cold War. Aid to Turkey and Greece and the Marshall Plan were policies that responded to specific crises, and did so brilliantly, yet they did not reflect a cogent, practical containment strategy. As articulated by George Kennan, containment existed in an impractical abstract form. Dean Acheson wrote in his memoirs, "[Kennan's] recommendations . . . were of no help", despite the veracity of his predictions and historical analysis. Nonetheless, Acheson and his colleagues admittedly dragged their feet in rendering containment operational.

U.S. policies towards Korea exemplified the dangers inherent in this approach. The Joint Chiefs of Staff advised in June 1949 that Korea was "of little strategic value to the United States and that any commitment to . . . military force in Korea would be ill advised and impracticable." But while South Korea would be insignificant in the looming apocalyptic conflict with the USSR, its defense symbolized America's commitment to its allies. Reconciling these divergent interests proved difficult for U.S. policy-makers. As historian John Lewis Gaddis writes, "[While] maintaining a 'defensive perimeter' and the long-term objective of preserving a non-hostile Asia were capable of eliciting agreement in Washington, no such consensus existed as to how to get from one to the other."[3] Dean Acheson's National Press Club speech in January 1950, in which he famously omitted Korea from America's Pacific defense perimeter, exemplified the absence of such a consensus.

When it comes to Korea, the popular narrative's shortcomings are especially apparent. Even the Truman Administration's famed commitment to multilateralism does not survive the Korean War unscathed. On June 27, 1950 U.S. policymakers gathered at the Blair House-the White House, much like America's national security policy, was getting a much needed face lift. In charting the U.S. response, Truman insisted on a role for the United Nations, telling one State Department official afterwards, "In the final analysis I did this for the United Nations. . . . If a collective system under the UN can work, it must be made to work, and, now is the time to call their bluff." The United Nations was very fragile in 1950, and Truman justifiably recognized that ignoring it would be a life sentence to irrelevancy like the League of Nations before it.

However, the only factor permitting Security Council sanctioning of American intervention in Korea was an ill-conceived Soviet boycott of the council because it refused to recognize the People's Republic of China and hand over its seat at the table. The United Nations was useful in a public relations sense, as it helped internationalize the Cold War, but had the Soviets vetoed resolution 83 on June 27, 1950, would the United States have watched the Republic of Korea collapse? If Britain and other NATO allies protested intervention, would the United States have remained on the sidelines? Doubtful. The simultaneous U.S. decision to blockade the Straits of Formosa without UN approval demonstrated the UN's limited utility for even its strongest supporters. Kennan, one of Beinart's other heroes, rejected any UN role from the start, exhibiting his typical skepticism of the institution.

But what if it didn't work? That was a question for Truman's advisors and not for the president himself. As all high school history teachers with a penchant for cliché desk adornments know, the buck stopped at Truman. But it certainly didn't start there. He was what our current executive would describe as "the decider." And he decided to go to the Security Council with resolution 83, which recommended "that the Members of the United Nations furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area." When the Soviets subsequently returned to Security Council, never to miss a vote again, the council reverted to functioning properly, that is to say, not well. The Soviet return forced the United States to seek further moral justification for its action via the toothless General Assembly and its "Uniting for Peace" Resolution.

Moving into North Korea and Away From "Victory"

In his West Point address, President Bush said: "The Korean War saw many setbacks, and missteps and terrible losses. . . . Yet, in the end, communist forces were pushed back to the 38^th Parallel-and the freedom of South Korea was secure." But UN forces had achieved this objective after three months of fighting in September 1950. The decision to cross the 38^th parallel illuminates the similarities between Bush and Truman and exposes the fictional foundation on which the neo-liberal narrative rests. 

Truman's approval of a ground campaign into North Korea to destroy the DPRK forces on September 11 repudiated the intervention's stated objective, "restoring the Republic of Korea to the status prior to the invasion from the North",[4] and did not have explicit Security Council approval. This was clearly not an example of Beinart's "Trumanesque" maxim that, "We all recognize-that no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."[5] It was more akin to a Bush-like preventative war, fought to prohibit the emergence of a future, but not imminent, threat to regional stability.

Chinese forces intervened and crossed the frozen Yalu River in October 1950, a massive U.S. intelligence failure in the form of 270,000 Chinese "Volunteers." Seoul was lost in January 1951 and the conflict turned into a stalemate that helped cost Truman a shot at reelection and the Democrats the White House in 1952. Over 30,000 Americans died in three years of combat.

The decision to forcibly reunite the Korean peninsula was indicative of the Truman Administration's acceptance of a Manichaean state of affairs in global politics. The "with us, or against us" attitude elevated potential proxies to an unprecedented status. The secretaries of the armed services viewed the Soviet movement as "monolithic." (Similarly, President Bush amalgamates all forms of Islamic militancy as "Islamofascist.") Though Kim Il-sung's nationalism inspired the initial North Korean assault, the United States assumed that the provocation was at Moscow's behest. For some Cold Warriors the threat from the USSR existed everywhere in an identical form. This belief, expressed in NSC-68, was at the core of the anti-communist left's modus vivendi, not an aberration from it, as Beinart suggests by grouping Kennan, a realist who opposed NSC-68, with the same liberal anti-communists who showed him the door at the State Department.

NSC-68 argued: "A defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere", a clear break with Kennan's emphasis on strategic prioritizing. By defining regimes a priori, the Truman Administration significantly weakened its diplomatic flexibility: its ability to engage in more classical diplomacy with a variety of international actors. The same is true of the Bush Doctrine.

After September 11, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, like Truman 54 years earlier. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." Just as NSC-68 precluded the United States from engaging in substantive dialogue with the Soviets, which Kennan supported, the Bush Doctrine does the same with uncooperative regimes. The former's influence on the latter is readily apparent in one of Bush's favorite books, The Case for Democracy, by Natan Sharansky.

Despite its idealistic rhetoric, NSC-68 forced America into uneasy partnerships with unsavory autocrats. As one White House official put it: "The free world vs. slave world treatment obscures one of the most difficult problems we face-the fact that many peoples are attracted to Communism because their governments are despotic or corrupt or both." In an ominous move, the administration's initial response to the North Korean invasion included a recommendation for increased aid to Indochina, the first of many steps in America's increasing commitment to Vietnam. Today, we rely heavily on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, countries that expose the superficiality of Bush's idealistic rhetoric.

On the left, Beinart argues that Kennan's vision for containment embodied the anti-communist left's ideals, and was betrayed by Vietnam. But the anti-communist left's ideals Beinart discusses cannot be found in Kennan's realist thought, but rather in NSC-68, the Bush Doctrine's ideological antecedent.

This explains why Beinart, and others, cannot simultaneously criticize the Bush agenda and embrace Truman and NSC-68. When it comes to the most challenging international issues-Iran, North Korea, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-the neo-liberal policy recommendations break little new ground. Multilateralism, soft power, and throwing money at autocratic regimes on the condition that they "develop a plan that enjoys clear popular support, conforms to broad democratic and market principles, and is completely transparent", offers no practical method for dealing with a Hamas government in the West Bank and Gaza or Ayatollah Ali Khameini in Tehran.[6] Not coincidentally, neither does the Bush Doctrine.

Analysis, not Analogy

The Truman Administration's policies are part of our country's long and rich legacy on which we can draw to help guide us in troubled times. But that legacy is more of a sketch than a blueprint. Truman is justifiably remembered as one of the great presidents of the 20^th century, but this stems from his record as a leader, not as a strategist. To be fair, he faced unparalleled and incessant crises. The title of Dean Acheson's memoirs, Present at the Creation, expresses the novelty of the historical context. Acheson dedicated his book to Truman, his "captain with the mighty heart", and in 1950 both captain and crew were in uncharted waters. In terms of leadership, the Truman standard is one to which we should aspire. In the War on Terror, just as we look to his leadership for inspiration, we must also look to his strategic shortcomings for lessons.

The Korean War illuminates many striking similarities between the Bush and Truman approaches to national security and grand strategy, similarities many liberal critics have ignored in attempts to place themselves within an imagined historical narrative. There are still major differences between Truman's leadership and that which we have today.

I didn't know Harry Truman, but it's fair to say that you sir, Mr. Bush, are no Harry Truman. And if a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, he or she won't be Truman either. While so much attention focuses on the misrepresentation of the present, the misrepresentation of the past is also disconcerting and is stifling the policy debate.

Sean R. Singer is an Apprentice Editor at The National Interest.