‘Some presidents were great and some weren’t,” said Harry Truman, six years after leaving office, before adding, in typical modesty: “I wasn’t one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one.”
The audience laughed but Truman actually was a great president, especially in the realm where Kamala Harris is most vulnerable: foreign affairs.
Truman had been vice president for 13 weeks when Franklin Roosevelt’s death thrust the former senator from Missouri into the thick of biblical-scale mayhem.
Having not even known of the atomic bomb’s existence when he assumed office, Truman soon decided to use it and thus displayed the first of three traits a world leader must possess – resolve.
When it came to the second asset, knowledge, Truman had much learning to do, but he learned fast, and understood even faster, soon emerging with the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe.
The fast learner realized that the war-ravaged world must be brought back to its feet.
However, the evolving statesman’s most crucial asset was neither resolve nor knowledge, but conviction. Truman understood that communism threatened the free world, and he set out to confront it by establishing NATO.
That’s why, despite what he said in that speech, and despite his provincial background, Truman was a great president.
The same went for Ronald Reagan, who understood that the world was divided between those who defended freedom and those who fought it; and for Richard Nixon, whose thaw with Beijing isolated Moscow and helped China retreat from communism.
Impacts for the good and bad
These presidents’ impacts remain effective to this day. Sadly, the same also goes for the legacies of their inversions – the presidents who were failed world leaders. JIMMY CARTER wanted to impose American human rights standards on the shah of Iran. It was a bundle of ignorance and naiveté.
Its price – the shah’s eviction by Ayatollah Khomeini – could hardly be more exorbitant, not only in terms of American interests but also in terms of Iranians’ human rights.
That is how the Islamist genie that destabilized the world came out of the bottle.
George W. Bush was also naive. Yes, he realized Islamism is civilization’s enemy, but he wouldn’t say that. Unlike the “Axis of Evil,” the term with which he referred to three specific dictatorships, when it came to the collision between Islamism and civilization, he called it “the war on terror,” thus focusing on the enemy’s weapon rather than its idea.Similarly, due to his limited knowledge of history, Bush made America fight simultaneously in two entirely different theaters.
It was a recipe for military overstretch and political failure that a great president would have avoided, whether out of knowledge or intuition.
The effects of these mistakes are with us to this day, as Iraq has fallen into Iran’s orbit. Bush was at least humble, and his mistakes were made under the shock of the September 11 attacks.That cannot be said of Barack Obama, whose first mistake, the Cairo Speech, was provoked by nothing, and yet showed the world that the new American president was clueless about foreign affairs, and thought he knew all about it.
Soon afterward, that conceit resulted in Islamism’s takeover of Egypt; in hollow threats to Syria’s leader while he gassed his people; and in Russia’s grand return to the Middle East, unopposed.
In whose footsteps will Kamala follow?
Now, chances are that Kamala Harris, if elected, will follow in the footsteps of Carter, Obama, and Bush.
HARRIS BRINGS an impressive record. She was an accomplished prosecutor, has earned national experience as a senator, and as vice president has been exposed to world affairs.
Even so, she earned hardly a fraction of Joe Biden’s half-century experience in foreign affairs, and her global vision, if she has one, has yet to be articulated.
Worse, international affairs are not her passion. At heart, Harris is a jurist, an identity that became patent, and positively so, in the Senate hearing where she cornered an evasive Brett Kavanaugh concerning his views on abortions, by asking him whether he knew of a law that tells men what to do with their bodies.
That performance was not only about knowledge. It was about engagement. It was about the judicial field where Harris spent her best years.
When it comes to foreign affairs, Harris lacks that kind of engagement, expertise, or curiosity. That’s why when given command of the immigration crisis, she didn’t get up and travel to the border to see what it was all about. It wasn’t her passion.
Yes, if a fraudster like Donald Trump is defeated by a woman who was, and at heart remains, a prosecutor, it will be the mother of all poetic justices. Yet huge though such a victory would be, it will not make Harris the stateswoman she is not.
To become what Truman became, or what Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher were already before they rose to power, Harris will need a clear reading of history in general, and this era in particular.
This means that when challenged by pro-Hamas Americans, she would have to tell them what she didn’t tell them the other day in Detroit: Hamas, unlike your suggestion, does not represent national liberation.
It represents Islamism; the murder of dissidents, the oppression of women, the persecution of gays, and the use of women and children as human shields.
Moreover, they are part of a global war against America, its beliefs, and its allies. That’s why Hamas is to this American what it is not to you: an enemy.
That’s what Kamala Harris, as of now, has not done, and what her party’s radicals will make it difficult for her to do. It is, however, what Harry Truman would have done. www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.