Can we have some adults take charge?

Publius has a good post up at Obsidian Wings comparing the relative sober, adult decisions that our leaders made during the cold war with the juvenile idiots who are managing things today:

The bottom line is that while it's true that Truman drew some lines that were important, he also resisted actions that could have easily led (in that paranoid, jumpy time) to all-out nuclear war or, at the very least, the destruction of some of the world's best cities. Thus, Truman is as important for what he chose not to do as for what he did. That last part is lost on the neocons and, to a lesser extent, the New Republic crowd. They cite the mere fact that Truman used (or threatened) force in certain circumstances to justify using force in whatever circumstances they favor.

And that leads to the second point -- the leaders in power were far more pragmatic than the leaders of today. More specifically, they didn't let their own silly, kindergarten ideas of good and evil justify intellectual laziness and failures to engage the world diplomatically. Throughout the Cold War, America negotiated with -- and talked to -- the Soviet Union and its satellites. When Mao initially took over China, America didn't come to Taiwan's aid in the hopes that it could negotiate with him, as it did with Tito. And of course, even despite China's support of America's enemies in Korea and Vietnam, Nixon shrewdly reached out to China to play the communist states against one another. Even the great Reagan adopted a strategy of engagement with the USSR. And throughout this entire period, communism was a far greater threat than either modern terrorism or the states of Iraq and Iran.

None of this is to say that America was happy that Mao or Tito held power. But people realized that the world was not black and white, and that the national interest (and world security) in some cases required you to make nice with people you don't particularly care for. It's part of living in an adult world rather than a fairy tale world of dragons and knights.

In addition, every silly argument you hear in favor of invading Iraq or of failing to engage with Iran or Syria could just have easily been made in the Cold War. People could have easily justified all-out war with, or diplomatic isolation of, Russia or China under the theory that those countries are "evil" or that we would eventually have to fight them down the road. But we chose neither route. We didn't attack them (despite opportunities) and we chose to engage them. And our patience paid off. In 1989, Communism died in Europe without the inevitable war that the Kristols of the day predicted. And China has become one of our most important trading partners. Just imagine how different the world would be if someone like Dick Cheney had been making these critical calls.