Jonathan Rauch: Learning From Ike
In those days, Communist China was the closest thing to today's Iran: a rising regional power, radical, ideological, antagonistic, and increasingly bold. Ike's secretary of State called the Chinese "an acute and imminent threat," and compared their "aggressive fanaticism" to Hitler's. Hawks clamored for action, saying that if the U.S. failed to defend Formosa, it would have to defend San Francisco later.
That was the climate in which Ike said:
"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it.... I would say a preventive war, if words mean anything, is to wage some sort of quick police action in order that you might avoid a terrific cataclysm of destruction later. A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today.... I don't believe there is such a thing, and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
Eisenhower's attitude put him at odds with the hawks of both his time and ours; anyone speaking as categorically against preventive war today as he did in 1954 would be derided by mainstream Republicans as a "defeatocrat," waiting for America's enemies to gather strength and strike first. But the victor of World War II was assuredly no dove. He made clear his theoretical willingness to use nuclear weapons, he sent U.S. marines to Lebanon, and he said, "We do not escape war by surrendering on the installment plan." The best way to see Eisenhower is as neither hawk nor dove but, so to speak, as a reptile: a cold-blooded realist.
In his day, realism dominated the councils of Washington. Today it is notably underappreciated, underrepresented, and misunderstood. When politicians reach for foreign-policy models, they cite practically every president except Eisenhower. That is a pity. The brand of realism he practiced, with its studied under-reaction and its easygoing unsentimentality, has never been more relevant than it will be in the post-Bush cleanup that is about to begin....
In today's America, hawks think that peace comes from American strength, deployed vigorously to deter adversaries and pre-empt threats. Doves think that peace comes from international cooperation, in which the United States must play a leading role. Reptiles are all for strength and diplomacy, but they believe that peace ultimately comes from something else: equilibrium.
In their view, competition and conflict on the world scene, like converging floodwaters, seek a natural balance that outsiders can ride or resist, can channel or manipulate or temporarily hold back, but usually cannot do very much to change. From a reptile's point of view, doves and hawks, different as they are politically, share a misguided sentimentality: doves about the power of global cooperation and sensible diplomacy to end conflict, hawks about the power of American force to ensure security....
What realism does hold is that pushing against a natural equilibrium is a high-cost, high-risk proposition -- sustainable for a while, but exhausting and likely to prove futile, or worse. For realists, when Vice President Cheney reportedly said,"We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it," he got the answer wrong. If we hope to succeed, we manage evil. We minimize, mitigate, and manipulate evil. But efforts to pre-emptively eliminate evil are prone to end in overreaction and destabilization, with consequences that are often worse than the original problem.
Eisenhower understood these risks. He dismissed the idea of a preventive attack on China,"pointing out that it would be a long time before China could threaten the United States," writes the historian Frederick W. Marks III,"by which time the configuration of world power might well have shifted." Eisenhower's staff secretary and closest aide, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, once said of his boss,"He was an expert in finding reasons for not doing things."...