At The National Interest Robert Merry presents his list of our worst wartime presidents. They are, for various different reasons:
- Wilson
- Truman
- Johnson
- George W. Bush
- Obama
I’m pretty sure there are some who will balk at President Obama’s presence in the list. Here’s what Mr. Merry says about that:
In one sense, it may seem unfair to place Obama in company with these other wartime presidents. For one thing, he didn’t initiate these wars but rather inherited them from George W. Bush. For another, the situation he inherited didn’t deteriorate into the kinds of messes characterized by these other tales of presidential failure. Third, it probably says something about America’s wartime history that an effort to list the five most hapless wartime presidents pulls into the mix a man such as Obama, whose wartime record only slightly places him in the category of failure.
On the other hand, presidents don’t get to make excuses based on what they inherit in taking office, nor do they get to trim on defining their success in relation to the performance of their predecessors. Obama inherited a mess; his job was to clean it up; on balance the situation got worse on his watch—not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in the surrounding region.
to which I would add that his “Afghan surge” can only be painted as a blunder. As a consequence of that decision several thousand young Americans died and who knows how many seriously injured to absolutely no end. The primary differences between the situation in Afghanistan now and in 2008 and are that seven years have passed, thousands of people have died, and billions of dollars has been spent.
Wilson was obviously an egregiously bad wartime president for the reasons listed by Mr. Merry. I think that Johnson’s offense was a different one from those listed by Mr. Merry. Johnson attempted to prosecute a war without placing the United States on a wartime footing. George W. Bush and Barack Obama made the same mistake and for that reason if for no other they aren’t out of place on a list of bad wartime presidents.
I also have a different problem with his list: it is prejudiced in favor of the present and recent past. How about James K. Polk who lead the country into what was obviously an unjust war of aggression? How about McKinley, ditto? We’re still living with the consequences of those wars, we merely accept them under the category “Things As They Are”. In a century the same will be true of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I agree with your criticism about historical prejudice and it’s way too early to tell with President’s Bush and Obama and even Johnson is still subject to much revision.
The list makes no sense. The only two who definitely belong on there are Johnson and Bush.
The rest? He blames Wilson for getting American into WW1, I guess, and then not protecting America from the global post-WW1 recession. Truman for not resolving Korea. And Obama for not resolving the conflicts in Iraq and Afghan. This is all weak stuff compared to the others. Especially when you think that Nixon is not on the list. He in fact praises Nixon for extricating America from Vietnam, which is wonderful until you remember that South Vietnam fell several years later, and that Nixon’s strategy was to blow dollars and lives into four years of nothing to achieve this extrication. He basically could have withdrawn in 1969 with the same results, except maybe the nine-dimensional plan to open China would have been stalled for four days or so. Meanwhile, the first oil crisis occurred.
I cannot figure out his metrics. Nixon and Bush both just declared victory and left, or in Bush’s case negotiated leaving, yet Nixon is brilliant. I also can’t tell if he thinks we should look at this from the POV of American interests or the interests of the countries with which we were at war.
Steve
The argument on Wilson goes something like this. We had no business involving ourselves in WWI at all. Had we not become involved it is likely it would have resulted in a negotiated settlement rather than an outright Allied victory which would not have thrown central Europe into such chaos after the war, setting the stage for WWII.
Then there are the domestic issues and the inability to deliver on U. S. signing the Treaty of Versailles.
I would frame the argument against Wilson more like this:
Having supplied by the French and British in the war, he exercised poor diplomatic skills in preventing the Germans from the conclusion that the U.S. was a hostile power.
Then when war came, he irresponsibly rushed as many men to Europe as possible in order to have the greatest influence on the post-war negotiations. This meant acceptance of the flu fatalities brought about by concentration of men in training facilities and ships, and sending inexperienced men to surge across the neutral ground. The price was too bloody but for the degree to which Wilson was able to influence the final peace — he got somethings, but not others, and certainly no effective League or effective peace.
The U. S. was hostile, PD. It violated its neutrality by shipping munitions to the Triple Entente. That has been proven conclusively.
For the Germans, the U.S. was hostile because it did not treat the British blockade of the North Sea against neutral powers, the same as the German U-boat blockade of the British Isles. I don’t know what the Germans knew about what was being shipped to the British, but they wanted to block food.
The Germans always claimed that they fired on the Lusitania because it was carrying munitions for delivery to Britain. That has now conclusively been demonstrated to have been true.
BTW, using human shields is a war crime whether you’re Saddam Hussein or Woodrow Wilson.
There are two different issues here. One is what is contraband. The British had erected a blockade in which food and ordinary goods were contraband, just as much as munitions. German policy was to respond in kind, but unlike the British, they lacked the capacity to conduct a traditional seizure of ships as prizes. The U-boat required surprise attack, which was what gave rise to outrage and claims of violation of the Laws of War.
The British had taken an expansive approach to the rights of neutrals without much protest from the U.S. The Germans were starving and the Northern European neutrals wanted the U.S. to lead an alliance that defended the navigation rights of neutrals. The U.S. didn’t because they had less investment in the North Sea trade, they wanted the Germans to lose, and they probably had limited ability to stand-up to the British anyway. As far as the Germans were concerned, the outcome was what mattered, ordinary Germans were being harmed, while the British were being supplied the same type of stuff from overseas colonies and neutrals.
That was William Jenning Bryan’s point. The U.S. couldn’t take a stand on rights of shipping in a one-sided manner and be neutral. The Germans did back-off of unrestricted submarine warfare for fear that the Americans would really start arming the British, but when they eventually changed their mind it was because they no longer cared if the Americans entered the war.
Some of the issue was political. By 1910 the number of Americans of German ancestry was at least as great as those of English, Scottish, and Irish descent but they were heavily concentrated in the Midwest and they were Republicans.
If Wilson had been a German Republican rather than an English Democrat, I suspect his attitude towards the war might have been different.