Arch Puddington: Budapest 1956 (Lessons for Today?)
The United States today is fighting an adversary at least as menacing as the one it confronted during the cold war, and bearing some of the same traits. Like the Soviet Union, al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its imitators are in the thrall of a totalizing ideology, are implacably hostile to liberal democracy, and are determined to overthrow and replace it wherever they can. As in the cold war, too, America?s conduct in countering this adversary has occasioned fierce debate here at home, pitting hawks against doves and so-called realists against neoconservatives, along with many other lines of political division.
Of course, the differences between the cold war and the current struggle are enormous. The Soviet Union was a superpower with a continental empire at its disposal and a huge arsenal of intercontinental missiles tipped with nuclear weapons to deter the U.S. from action. With notable exceptions like Iran, our adversaries today are not even countries but shadowy and constantly evolving sub-national groups, some of them autonomous cells, that neither hold state power nor, for the time being, have access to sophisticated weaponry.
Still, even with the marked contrast between the two conflicts in mind, it is useful to look back at cold-war America for lessons, whether heartening or cautionary, about the foreign-policy challenges we face today. Among the twists and turns of that earlier conflict-- the Hungarian revolution of 1956--an event that occurred exactly 50 years ago?sheds its own special light on our present situation. The appearance of a new and well-researched book by the historian Charles Gati aids in reassessing this highly controversial and still-pertinent chapter of the past....
Despite setbacks like Hungary--and far worse debacles to come in Southeast Asia--the United States ultimately prevailed in the cold war because it came to recognize early on that it was in it for the long haul. To a certain extent, Gati is right: some of the mistakes he highlights were the result of professed goals on which America could not readily deliver. But once Washington rid itself of illusions about the duration of the struggle, politicians of both parties were able to concentrate on containing the Soviets and, where opportunities presented themselves, expanding freedom's reach.
Learning from its mistakes?and, over five decades, there were certainly many?America ultimately emerged victorious by, first, retaining a firm and unquestioning faith in the superiority of its democratic values and, second, by meeting its challenges with fortitude and patience. The same two sets of qualities are needed if we are ever to declare"mission accomplished" in the conflict with the committed and merciless set of adversaries we are confronting today. The great question is whether these qualities still persist to the same degree within American political culture, and in as many hearts, as they did a half-century ago.