How do we tailor our response to
Russia's intervention in the Ukraine?
Sam Tanenhaus, in Sunday's NYT (3 1-14), says we should follow the
pattern handed down to us by Cold War presidents, who, resisting the calls for
tough, forceful action, trimmed and stretched and made accommodations.
Eisenhower, preferring stability
to confrontation, stood by while the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary, Kennedy
pulled our missiles out of Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev’s calling his back
from Cuba, Nixon agreed to cut our stockpile of nuclear weapons in exchange for
the Soviets' cutting theirs, and even Ronald Reagan, the great hawk hero, came
to the aid of Poland's Solidarity heroes only with words, money, and equipment.
"The Cold War,"
Tanenhaus reminds us, "was defined from the outset less
by outright confrontation than by caution," a caution that came with
"adjustment, compromise, improvisation and at times retreat." He also reminds us that it was marked
by denunciations of the cautious as
"weak-willed," "soft," and "naive."
Calling any of
those presidents "naive" (as just yesterday I heard somebody on Fox
call President Obama for his caution)
is about as double-edged a charge as you're likely to hear. What held Eisenhower back in the case
of Hungary and held Reagan back in the case of Poland was an unalterable
reality: proximity to Russia and distance from us. The world's largest standing army, the one that defeated
Hitler (yes, it could have done it by itself), was right there; the smaller forces
that Representative John W.
McCormack wanted to call on were, for the most part, way over here, on
this side of a big ocean. And he
said the Eisenhower administration was
living in "a dream world."
If McCormack
and his like had in mind the use, not of our comparatively small number of
soldiers but of our large number of atomic weapons, they still don't look very
realistic. To avoid
"emboldening" the Russians you're going to let fly the atom bombs and
start World War III? That
possibility doesn't require some caution?
OK, so what's
the first thing you do in an international crisis with the Russians? As I read Sam Tanenhaus it's simple:
tune out Fox network. Then (I
would add) get down to the realities and imagine how our actions might look
from their side. What do we expect
from people who, regardless of their form of government then and now, suffered
50-60 million casualties because they didn't make sure that nations on their
borders were friendly to them?
What has to be
fitted into this reality is our promotion of democracy and the protection of
human rights. It's a tough
fit. That's why today's presidents
should do what Tanenhaus says Cold War presidents did: adjust, compromise, and
improvise. You want pants you can
wear? Go to Tanenhaus.
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