Any political historian will tell you that government decisionmakers frequently use historical analogies in making up their minds and that, more often than not, they do so badly. And Kimber Quinney reminded us in her thoughtful November 9 commentary that historians are not immune to employing such analogies either, or in doing so badly.
Courtesy of the Truman Presidential Library
Yet as one who in another life spent considerable time analyzing U.S. policy toward China during the early Cold War, I cannot resist the temptation to suggest a parallel between the dilemmas facing the Obama administration in Afghanistan and those of the Truman administration in the fall of 1947 regarding China. In both cases U.S. decision-makers faced a civil war in which an ally appeared to be losing ground; in both cases the United States had made considerable effort to assist the ally, but with poor results; in both cases a decision had to be made–and soon–as to whether or not to substantially increase aid already given; in both cases a major concern was that, without broad reforms in the allied government, American aid would be ineffective and, in any event, would drain U.S. resources at a time when they were/are in high demand elsewhere.
In the Truman administration’s case, pressures to escalate U.S. involvement in China were resisted, and it is interesting to recall why. First, China was not considered strategically vital to American interests. Second, the American public showed little enthusiasm for major new commitments to China, especially if these included the direct use of military forces in the civil war. And third, the prospects for thoroughgoing reform of the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek were poor, in part because to Chiang such action would require at least the disciplining, at most the removal, of long-time internal allies. This, in turn, would threaten his control over his own government. Yet without extensive internal changes, the Truman administration (or at least its State Department) believed, the only way to hold off the Communists would be for U.S. armed forces to take over the war.
The Truman administration paid a price for its decision on China, both at home and abroad. Yet the judgment of most historians, myself included, is that that price was a good deal lower than the one that beginning a process of escalation would have entailed.
To be sure, the China situation then and the Afghanistan one now hardly constitute a perfect analogy. The past rarely provides us with such. Still, the challenge of wise decision-making is in part to judge which among imperfect analogies are useful in grasping current situations and evaluating (again imperfect) options. Whether or not the China analogy has appeared in the Obama administration’s deliberations, press accounts make it clear that decision-makers are well aware that at least the second and third reasons outlined above for the Truman administration’s refusal to escalate in China are present in the case of Afghanistan. On the first of the three reasons, no consensus appears to have emerged.
Analogies aside, what impresses me in recent weeks is the range of serious folks outside government who have come out against escalation. We can expect folks clearly on the left to do so, but when rightists and centrists such as George Will, Fareed Zakaria, and Thomas Friedman do the same, that should be a real warning sign to the Obama administration.
Then again, there’s Rush Limbaugh. Hmmm…..
William Stueck
William Stueck is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia. He is currently writing a history of U.S.-Korean relations. He is the author of, among other works, Rethinking the Korean War (Princeton University P, 2002) and The Korean War: An International History (Princeton U, 1995).