278. Update on the Great Game

If you don't remember how Prof. John J. Mearshimer deplored our move to expand NATO eastward (Foreign Affairs 93:5, 2014, my Post 262) maybe you remember diplomat George Kennan's warning at the time, "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely."  I placed the move as part of "The Great Game" played by Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century and joined enthusiastically by the U. S. in the twentieth (Post 262).

Even if you have been too busy to pay close attention you probably know that the game hasn't been going too well for us.  We looked either weak or stupid after Putin did what he wanted to the country of the good man we supported [Saakashvili, of Georgia] and we looked like a mere noisemaker when he went into Crimea. 

Now it looks like our opponent is going to put some serious points on the board.  As the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia sat down in Minsk he still, as the NYT analysis (Andrew Higgins, 2-12-15) made clear, "held the decisive cards."  The leaders "confronted the reality that Mr. Putin held the upper hand precisely because he is prepared to use military force to get what he wants in diplomacy."

Why couldn't we see that moving NATO so close to Russia was a bad move, that it was even what Kennan called it at the time, "a tragic mistake"?  Why couldn't we listen to Kennan?  Because, I think, we were deafened by our own sounds.  Democrats wanted to make good sounds and Republicans wanted to make tough sounds.  And now here we are, reduced to a squeak.   We weren't willing to go to war.  We never were.  Putin is.  Squeak, squeak while his points go up.

The game is played in front of American voters.  An administration can't retreat in front of Republicans because that would be soft.  An administration has to go forward because of Democrats, who can't leave good people to their fate (the first moves east were made under the Carter and Clinton administrations). 

Part of the problem is that we keep getting the wrong people into the game.  Generals and Defense department types (think Rumsfeld) are not the people to play diplomacy.  Not even, if they are in the administration, to comment on it.  Their job (as in the administrative reform I dreamed of in Post 271) is to carry out what the policy-makers decide on, and give advice on capabilities. 

 But just a week ago Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges' view of  "NATO's Russian Front" appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages (7-8 Feb, 15).  He "won't weigh in directly in the Washington policy debate" but Russia, he says, "has set out to redraw the boundaries of Europe."  And he won't worry about our provoking dangerous responses.  "You know, frankly, you hear this often from people in the West, 'Oh, we don't want to provoke the Russians.'  I think concern about provoking the Russians is probably misplaced.  You can't provoke them.  They're already on a path to do what they want to do."

Once again I find myself wishing that American leaders, and behind them the American people, would ask themselves the question asked in tough bars, and the sooner the better: "Are you willing to fight?"  If the answer is no you sit back and keep your mouth shut. 

262. The Use of the Word "Uneducated"

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Democracy's faith in the common man gives well-informed, carefully analyzing citizens of democracies a problem when they want to refer to poorly informed, carelessly analyzing citizens.  Ignorance and carelessness on the part of voters can be dangerous, and you want to use words that will discredit it, but you don't want to use words that discredit the common man enough to make you a danger to democracy.  The contempt in Bill Maher's "dipshits" could have made him a danger.  Slurs like his make smart "men on horseback" (macho dictators) an attractive alternative.

Thomas Jefferson freely referred to the masses of the cities of Europe as "canaille," a pack of dogs, which, if given power, would destroy "everything public and private."  Friedrich Nietzsche fought to defend himself "hand and foot" against people who confused him with the "anti-Semitic canaille" of those cities.  But no American can use "canaille" to refer to the masses in American cities.

Once Americans could get away with a term like "Know-Nothings" but not now.  We say "low-information voter," and are happy at not being thought elitists, since the opposite is only "high-information voter."

Plato's "the multitude" refers exactly to the group we are worried about, those who form opinions uncritically, but its discrediting power is lost if it's taken as mere quantification, as those who don't know Plato are likely to do.  The same with his "the many," which could be more strongly elitist, suggesting "we few," we smart ones.  "Masses" won't do since we don't have "classes."  Masses are those lumpen things that swelled up in Europe and got talked about by Karl Marx, that word-poisoner.

Set against those options, "uneducated" looks attractive, but we've got to be careful with it.  We don't want to imply a permanent condition or a kind of people.  Recognize that nobody is educated all of the time and everybody is educated some of the time.  Play safe, maybe, by using it only in combination with "in."  Poets are "uneducated in" worldly consequences. 

The Ukraine crisis gives us an excellent opportunity to see how this usage would go.  Say I sound off about the crucial issue, one way or the other ("NATO is justified in expanding to take in Ukraine." "No, no, it isn't.")  But I don't know much about the back story.  A friend directs me to two articles in the September/October issue of the periodical Foreign Affairs.

The first, by John J. Mearsheimer, is titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin."  It gives me the history of and reasons for Russian sensitivity to unfriendly powers on its borders, asks me to "imagine the outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico," and shows me how firmly Russian leaders expected Western diplomats to respect their concerns.

The second article, by Mary Elise Sarotte, is titled "A Broken Promise?  What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion."  It shows me that Russian expectations, at least with respect to a promise supposedly made to get Russia to approve the unification of Germany, had no reason to be so firm.  There was no promise.

After I read these articles I say that I have been "educated in the Ukraine crisis."  And I am willing to say that before reading them I was "uneducated in the Ukraine crisis."  But that makes me say that people who haven't read those articles are "uneducated."   That's too categorical, too much of a knock.  Better say that the readers are "better educated" than the non-readers.

Yes, I think we've got it, an accurate expression that preserves respect or the common man and keeps democracy safe.

Uh huh, and when SS men take over "Aryan" to justify smashing Semites' shop windows I'm going to refer to them as "less well educated" than men who have learned what "Aryan" really means?  I'm making "canaille," even "dipshits," look good.  Discrediting force must count for something in a word.

Such a problem.  The safer I make a word the more I weaken it.  But not everywhere.  How will it go in the circle of Economist, New York Review, and New Yorker readers?  Which would we rather the editors overhear (our constant hope), "Well, the Foreign Affairs editors are certainly better educated than the Economist editors," or "Well, the Economist editors have just joined the Know Nothings...or the canaille," or even, at the end, "gone dipshit"?  Remember, we're talking about that issue with spider Putin on the cover (10 July - 1 August, 2014 — see Post 253). 

I'm not sure of the discrediting force here but I feel sure the former expression, the one that makes them less well educated, will have some force on the editors, and maybe it will have enough to do some good.

Would it have enough to make up for what it fails to do in the streets, the daily media, where we so need good police work?  Have we turned our guys' billy sticks into ladies' fans?  With the SS on their rampage what would we be longing for?  "These guys are dipshits!"  Of course.  And we'd be defending, not jeopardizing, democracy.

It's easy, especially for academics, to undervalue verbal violence.  In skillful hands, in satire, in ridicule, in pointed abuse, it can substitute for physical violence, and make government crackdowns unnecessary.  "Yahoos!" says Jonathan Swift of the rabble in Houyhnhnm land.  "Yahoos!" says Whitney Balliett of the fraternity boys disrupting the jazz festival in Newport.  The sting brings order to the next jazz festival, without more constricting government orders.

258. Tribal Loyalty and the English Language

 
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Linguistic clarity may be essential to moral clarity, as a subhead on yesterday's (9-6-14) Times' OpEd reminds us, but it's so hard, so hard, to maintain it.  As soon as you leave your neutral academic classroom and join (or admit that you are already a member of) a tribe you feel the muck sticking to your words.

I think I felt it when I recognized my membership in the Israeli tribe, through my attachment to the Judeo-Christian tribe of Western history (Post 225).  As soon as the Egyptian generals overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government I began to fear clarity in describing their deed.  Why?  Because the generals would, in a pinch, help Israel and not her enemies.  (As, when the pinch came in Gaza they did, shutting off tunnels that the elected Brotherhoood president, I feel sure, would not have shut off..)

So, anticipating that, what do I want of the words describing what the generals have done.  Certainly not clarity.  This is the world, where words serve purposes.  Here the purpose, Israel's security, demands obfuscation.  So I, the lord of accuracy in my Composition classroom, wince at the accurate use of the word "coup" for the action that put the generals where they are.  "Couldn't we have a little muck on this one?"

If there were a tribal membership that Chrystia Freeland, author of the OpEd piece, might discover in herself it would be, through her mother, the tribe of liberal Ukrainians, with clan connections to the tribe of her father, the Liberal Party of Canada, through which Freeland has now become a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Freeland's voice in the beginning of her piece could be that of a colleague speaking in the next classroom.  She speaks up strongly for clear language, and exposure of obfuscation.  She reproaches Western leaders and journalists for their reluctance to use plain terms.  Russia's actions clearly constitute "an invasion," the term Ukraine's cyberactivists use, and are not "an incursion," the term favored by President Obama and accepted by journalists.  She appeals, as we all do, to George Orwell's faulting of slovenly language: "that it makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

But what would we hear from that classroom if the rest of her piece were before it?  Here's the central paragraph:

We may decide we lack the will to stop this [invasion] or to more forcefully help Ukrainians to stop it, but in making that decision we need to be clear about what is going on.  The distinction between lies and truth matter here because this conflict started with the Ukrainian people's revolt against authoritarianism and in favor of the liberal rights and responsibilities Ukrainians call European values.  In the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, moral clarity is essential, but to get there we need linguistic clarity, too: Ukrainians decided to build a democracy at home and make a trade deal with Europe; Russia invaded.

Well-instructed students will go to the central statement that "Ukrainians decided to build a democracy" and the implication that Russians interrupted that building.  How does it fit what's being described?  A little research will show the student that Ukraine had a democracy.  Their president was voted into office by a majority of the Ukrainian people in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards."  What else is democracy, neutrally defined?  And that president was removed by action in the streets.  The word "interruption" fits that, and Russia had nothing to do with it.  What Russia is interrupting now is an interruption of democracy.

I don't know what other academics will make of this.  I suspect that, from the hum I hear, over in political philosophy they're retheorizing faith in the common man.  How can you trust the common man when in the Ukraine he overwhelmingly elects a mug like Yanukovich and then so overwhelmingly rejects him that he, the common man, can't hold himself back long enough to vote him out in the next election?  Same challenge in Egypt.  Give the common man a decent election, finally, and the winners are a bunch of fanatics.

I have no doubt that Chrystia Freedland would make a good Composition teacher.  Her heart, like mine, is in the right place.  She wants words to connect accurately with the world as it is.  But she is as much a tribe member as I am, and you can see it in her words about the Ukraine.

254. The Hawk in Us, the Dove in Us.

 
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Men are 76% hawk and 24% dove.  Women are 68% dove and 32% hawk.  Seventy-five years of watching human beings consider war have given me those figures.

My mother gave me an explanation of the difference: "If men had to give birth they wouldn't be so quick to kill each other."

"Hawk" and "dove" have no permanent value.  Sometimes you want the hawk in man's nature to kick in and sometimes the dove.  It all depends on what analysis of the always-complicated particulars has shown.

If the analysis comes out with a "can't win" or "can't win without prohibitive cost" or "can't win without shame," you want to release your dove enzyme.  You are a citizen in a democracy and, since war or peace will depend on the number of individual enzyme triumphs, your squirt, one way or the other, is going to count.

Can enzyme squirts be controlled?  Enough to matter, I think.  We control that enzyme that makes us lust, whatever it is.  We put off looking at dirty pictures.  We, if we are in the priesthood, take cold showers.  When it's the hawk enzyme we're trying to stay on top of we can avoid looking at displays of atrocities, newsreels full of goose-steppers, leaders' faces made to suggest Stalin or Hitler.  Those are dirty pictures.

If analysis goes the other way, go ahead and look.  You'll need that testosterone.  Your country's leaders will need it.  Say we're attacked.  "Release the testosterone!" says the President, coming out of a cabinet meeting, and his people go to work on the pictures.  In a good cause.  Properly done.  We all do our best to control the dove enzyme.

No enzyme release, dove or hawk, is proper without analysis.  What The Economist released with its editorial on Putin's vices (along with putting his grey face in a web on its cover, that dirty picture) is improper.  Putin's vices, internally practiced, are no more appropriate in an analysis of international power than the Pope's virtues.  The question is, How many divisions does he have?  And where?

And the answers here are (1), "more than enough to take over the Ukraine any time he wants to" and (2) "right there on the border, or nearby" — in any case, a lot nearer than any we can muster.  Russian military forces have come a long way since 1993, when Yeltsin settled on an internally focused National Guard of about 100,000.

If that doesn't tighten your ducts there remain the nuclear weapons.  In November, 2012, "the Federation of American Scientists estimated that Russia has approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads, and another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads."

So put away those dirty pictures, Economist.  Take a cold shower.  You can do it.  Determined Christians, Christians brought up reading Dante and Milton, have done it for centuries.  It's called "reason governing the passions."

Would you like to have an example of a man governing his passions in our day, and in the face of these very temptations?  Malcolm Fraser, former prime minister of Australia, provides it in a piece he wrote for the Guardian on March 2, advising everybody to quiet down over Russia's incursion into Crimea.

Nobody can say Fraser lacks balls.  He's the Secretary of the Army who, against rising cries, managed and stuck to the program to conscript Australian youth and send them to fight in Viet Nam.  He's the Minister of Defence who brought a government down because the prime minister was interfering with his work.

So he was sitting on top of something when Putin threatened to intervene in Ukraine. And he kept on top of it long enough to consider why Putin was threatening.  A big reason was that he thought that the U.S. had promised his predecessor, Gorbachev, that if Russia agreed to the joining of then-communist East Germany to West Germany, and make it part of the West (membership in NATO), then NATO (the West) would not "move one foot East" — into "an area of traditional Russian influence."

Fraser counts on us to fill in his hints for the main reason that Russia is concerned about its sphere of influence.  It's not that it presides over an evil empire that it longs to see grow; it's that twice it's been invaded so appallingly from the West, first by Napoleon, then by Hitler.  We Americans easily blow away sphere-of-influence thinking as obsolete in a globalized family of nations, but we live safely with oceans all around us.  As does this Australian, Fraser.

But Fraser is analyzing now, and trying to see a problem "from the other fellow's point of view" (as the principal of my elementary school put his advice to us playground fighters).  That effort leads him to see NATO, which many thought "had done its job," move eastward "to the borders of Russia."  Right where Napoleon and Hitler had started from.

Fraser concludes that the move east "was provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia: we are not willing to make you a co-operative partner in the management of European or world affairs; we will exercise the power available to us and you will have to put up with it."

In other words, playground belligerence.  That "belligerence" is the right word we confirm when we see President Bush trying to put elements of the anti-ballistic missile system into Poland and the Czech Republic, claiming that they're aimed at Iran. What other word would we use if Russia tried to put missiles into Nicaragua?  (Fraser didn't ask that; a little of my own enzyme is getting mixed in here.)

Even without my additions, though, Fraser makes a strong enough case to get a good dove surge, and it might have been even stronger if he had ignored the close studies showing that the U. S. did not, in fact, make that promise to Gorbachev. Enough people believe he did, enough to give him the necessary surge.  But no, he admits that Gorbachev "almost certainly" was mistaken.  And there goes Fraser's chance to produce an orgasm for peace, and get the big credit.  But so be it.  An analysis that comes out 75-25, rather than 90-10, still calls for the right enzyme.

What an exciting fallback Fraser makes!  It makes me so glad I chose him as my example of a man governing his passions in our day. Reason, demanding fairness and accuracy, was clearly in control.

hawks and dovesMalcolm FraserPutintestosterone managementUkraine crisiswar and peace

253. The Case of the Transformed Leader

 
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I'm talking about public intellectual leadership, like that of Le Monde in Paris.  I thought the editors of The Economist were providing that for us.  When they decided to back the invasion of Iraq their spokesman, in the leading "leader" (editorial), stuck to what mattered in international relations.  Only once did he (or she) refer to Saddam Hussein's personal qualities ("violent and murderous") and not once did he refer to his behavior inside his country, like gassing his people.

Contrast that with the leading leader in the current Economist, urging more forceful action in the Ukraine.  It's all about Vladimir Putin — trying to get an "unwilling" world to see him "as he really is."  That is, basically, as a liar, a point reinforced by the picture of a sinister-looking, grey-faced Putin looking out from the middle of a spider web on the magazine's cover.

Yet theirs is not just a case against a person.  It ends with a recommendation for action.   America has been "talking tough but has done nothing new."  Then the rock-em, sock-em conclusion: "Bridge-building and resets will not persuade [Putin] to behave as a normal leader.  The West should impose tough sanctions now, pursue his corrupt friends and throw him out of every international talking shop that relies on telling the truth."

Which international, truth-reliant talking shops, we wonder, does The Economist have in mind?  The UN Security Council, with Colin Powell laying out the evidence for WMD?  The General Assembly, where Andrei Gromyko denied the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba?  Or maybe just the world television theater, where Lyndon Johnson explained the aggression against us in the Tonkin Gulf? "

Suppose the Economist editors win on this issue.  Suppose they get the West to impose really severe sanctions.  And then, when they don't work, more severe sanctions, and more.  Isn't there a point where Putin will ask, "How much more have I got to lose if I just invade and take over the place?"  After he bites the bullet on lost trade he can do that so easily.  For this job he's got overwhelming military weight, his countrymen are behind him, and the battlefield is on his doorstep, not ours.

I see the Economist editors gathering in the office the next day.  They see that those responsible in our government face the choice of a backdown or World War III.  In any case, another gigantic mess — with the promise of worse in a renewal of the Cold War.  My guess is that somebody in that room will be conceiving the kind of blog post recently produced about the decision to support the Iraq invasion.  It's titled "Anniversary of a mass delusion," and the author, M. S., was apparently privy to the discussions at the New York Times when its editors decided to back the war.  His post, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/iraq-war,  is said by The Economist  to come from "one of our blogs."

It is so full of regret.  What they had taken as justification for war is now seen to be "all a fever dream" in the minds of "otherwise intelligent men."  The author is left with a very sad conclusion:

that all of us, including those of us considered the most responsible, well-trained and serious, are entirely capable of talking ourselves into lurid fantasies; that the actions we believe constitute difficult but necessary choices may in fact be the gestures of sleepwalkers battling phantoms.

He has in mind discussions in which the thinking looks very much like the thinking of the present Economist editors.  Just as much concentration on irrelevancies (Putin's and his country's vices), just as many ideas presented in inflammatory way (Putin in a spider web on the cover).  It's not too much of a stretch to see the editors as Cold War sleepwalkers.

I think our last thoughts, though, should be on this blogger's regret.  What he's regretting is hawkishness that's different from the hawkishness in The Economist's present leader.  In its leader on Iraq The Economist reasoned its way into a position we had to call "hawkish."  In its leader on the Ukraine the Economist argued in a way we can hardly distinguish from that of the emotional hawks writing for the newspapers we once cast aside in favor of The Economist — because it was more balanced and thoughtful, more focused on the relevant.

244. How to Strengthen a Scofflaw, Crony-Feeding Autocrat

Say his people have a strong sense of the motherland, which, unlike yours, has been deeply invaded twice from the west, devastating the country and mowing down its people.  Say that some time after repelling the last invasion the people saw some provinces of the country break away, and one province take with it a small part of the motherland that, for administrative convenience, had been transferred to it from another province.  Say this part of the motherland had been particularly fought over, so that the people could see a lot of their blood on its ground.

Say the ruler of this country is a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat representing an old, objectionable political system, and that a lot of his citizens still find it objectionable.  So his position as leader is not perfectly secure.  What could you as an outsider do to strengthen his position?

Well, obviously, you've got to threaten the motherland so that he can play "guardian of his people."  Nothing plants a ruler in power more firmly.  But you can't do that just bang.  This place is far away and a lot has to have been done earlier to get close.

Say that you're lucky and that that has been done.  Your alliance, NATO, instead of breaking up when this country broke up, and was no longer the threat that NATO was formed to meet, did not break up but stayed together and continued to press.  And your predecessors in office were happy to see it press, and pressed it to press, because so many of their countrymen were pressing them to press.  (I don't know why they did this.  It seems crazy.  Was it habit?  Was it inattention?  Or did they just not know how to behave unless they had an enemy?  I mean, they'd had a really evil enemy, and then a pretty evil enemy, and then people they could plausibly call evil, all those years, and there was all this great equipment ready to use against evil enemies.  How were they going to live without an enemy?)

Anyway, your predecessors put missiles in a country very close to this motherland, and then one of them wanted to press NATO right up to the borders of the now reduced nation.  You know what that's going to do to those people with a motherland sense.  They know that NATO membership means that these nations next to them have the United States ready to go to war, obliged by treaty to go to war, for them.  They, besides feeling ignored, or taken lightly, or affronted, lovers of the motherland are going to feel endangered and be very much on edge.

OK, you've got your chance, but first you are going to have to make some preliminary moves yourself.  The ruler of this reduced country makes some gestures of cooperation, even friendship.  He goes along with what you want to do to secure yourself against Iran and, to help you retract your over-extended neck in the Syrian conflict, offers to mediate.  You've got to keep seeing these as enemy moves.  "Russia tries again to insert itself into the Middle East."  That will shut up the re-set supporters in Russia.

Now you can set your tyrant in concrete, with a marble statue to follow.   He moves to take back the part of the motherland that, with the lost province, will go over to his people's old enemies.  I mean, they think that way too.  So you (or your secretary of state) huff, puff, complain, and threaten in all the old terms, so that the tyrant can (as Putin just did, NYT 3-19-14) quote you and discredit you by showing your hypocrisy (since you have tolerated the same thing in your friends) but most of all by showing your continuing presence as a threat.

As for his big speeches, you've practically written them for him.  "Our country is cornered" (applause), "they cheated us again and again" (applause), "if you press a spring too far it will recoil" (thunderous applause), "Crimea has always been a part of Russia" (standing ovation),  "after a long, hard and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!"  (chants of "Russia!  Russia!").  Tears of joy, tears of approval, tears of gratitude to the guardian of the Russian people.  You couldn't lock a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat in office more securely.

242. The Descent of "The Economist"

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The Economist just (Leader, 3-8-14) called Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich "a home-grown autocrat."  That's another thing against him as a very bad man.  But it's a thing not accurately named.  Yanukovich was voted into office.  He is "a home-elected democrat."

So is Mohammed Morsi and so are Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, to name elected officials demonstrated against in the streets by people we have been asked to sympathize with.  Asked, that is, by people who put goodness above democracy.  In America those people must not be very sensitive to words, since they, or their newspapers, are also quick, not noticing the irony, to reproach other people (nations, leaders) for their hostility to democracy.

By now there are now, as I count them, 83 ironies in Americans' use of the word "democracy" since their government backed the Egyptian generals (yes, we controlled them; we could have cut off parts to their tanks and planes) in their overthrow of the elected president.  There was a time when The Economist was sensitive to these ironies, at least enough to keep the blatant slant, the Murdoch slant, out of their nouns.  Maybe after you've made the "vileness" of a regime (Syria's. among others) sufficient cause for action against it the slant gets easier.

Democracy makes  "badness" hard to locate.  What do you call the people who elected the bad Yanukovich (in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards")?  What do you call the candidate who lost to him, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or the president elected to serve from 2005 to 2010, Viktor Yuschenko?   They were West-leaning so they must have been good, right?  Well the good politicians had their chance and the people had their choice.  And they elected the bad politician.  What are they, bad people? 

And you know what?  In all that time there wasn't an autocrat in sight.  

241. Ukraine: Sam, You Made the Pants Just Right.

 

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.