Present at the Re-creation

LIKE THE COLD WAR, the War on Terror is being defined even as it is fought, by a president who didn't expect it. In 1945, Harry Truman finished a hot war and stepped into a postwar world that seemed stable and certified: The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, the victorious Big Five of the World War II coalition, would keep order together through the United Nations, designed as their hand-crafted instrument. In 2001, George W. Bush stepped into a world in which history itself was believed to have ended, the United States was secure as the sole superpower, and the peace disturbed only by unconnected and regional quarrels. Neither man was known for his passionate interest in world affairs or grand strategy. Yet Truman ended up as the conceptualizer of the Cold War, the president who set American foreign policy on the path it would follow for the next half-century. And Bush now bids fair to do the same for the War on Terror.

For Truman, the moment of truth was more subtle than September 11--intense Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey, and Britain's announcement that it could not guarantee their security. On March 12, 1947, Truman went before Congress to ask for $400 million in aid to those countries, and pledged to confront Russian expansionism wherever it arose. On September 20, 2001, Bush went before Congress promising to avenge the terrorists' carnage, and pledging to confront terrorists wherever they might be. Six weeks later, he launched his campaign in Afghanistan. Both men soon sought to give institutional form to their new policies. In June 1947, the Truman administration unveiled the Marshall Plan; the following month, Congress passed the National Security Act, which combined all the military services in the Defense Department, set up the new CIA, and created the National Security Council to give expert advice to the president. On June 12, 2002, Bush asked Congress to create a new Department of Homeland Security, to combine all or part of 22 different federal agencies, to merge the intelligence gathering capabilities of the CIA and FBI, to allot $1.6 billion to the states to prepare against possible future emergencies, and $4.3 billion for drugs, vaccines, and other safeguards against a potential bioterrorist onslaught.

To cope with a different and new kind of menace, Truman adopted the theme of containment, based on the idea that the Communists, while aggressive and ruthless, had no great desire to murder Americans, had no interest in seeing their people and countries demolished, and could therefore be deterred from expansion by persistent and credible threats. To cope with a different and new kind of menace, Bush is elaborating a preemption doctrine, based on the belief that terrorists are ruthless and also have a lively desire to murder Americans, have no concern for the welfare of the states they work out of, and subscribe to a death cult in which murderous martyrdom is the highest good. "Deterrence--the promise of massive retaliation--means nothing against the shadowy terrorist networks with no nations or citizens," Bush said on June 1. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles. . . . The war on terrorism cannot be won on the defensive. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge."

Truman began 1946 concentrating on Greece and Turkey. He then moved throughout the year after to make himself the protector of the entire non-Communist world. The Marshall Plan, which addressed Western Europe, was proposed in June, and passed six months later. In June 1948, he reacted to the Russian blockade of Berlin by beginning an airlift that saved the city. It was this event, and Communist coups soon after in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary, that spurred the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed April 4, 1949. That same year, the administration drafted the strategy document known as National Security Council Report 68, a long-term plan for a very long and grim conflict, that assessed the Communist threat to the world and laid out a grand strategy able to fight it. In time, in the words of Paul Johnson, "it produced specific alliances or agreed obligations to 47 nations and led American forces to build up or occupy 675 bases and station a million troops overseas."