Obama’s All Eisenhower On Russia

[DonViejo]

Robert Shrum

Like Ike before him, Obama’s non-moves against Russia are the right moves.

A regime in thrall to Moscow is forced out by a popular uprising; the Kremlin promises not to intervene, and even announces a troop withdrawal. Within days, Russian forces stealthily begin to move in, then pour across the border. A whole swath of territory is reincorporated into what Ronald Reagan called "the evil empire."

The place was Hungary; the year was 1956; the American president was Dwight Eisenhower, who expressed "shock and dismay" at the Soviet invasion, but refused an armed American response. It was simply too dangerous, too unthinkable, in the atomic age—unless the most vital of U.S. interests were at stake. Even then, Ike once angrily explained to his hawkish advisor Lewis Strauss: "There's just no point in talking about 'winning' a nuclear war."

In fact, the Eisenhower administration had misread and then mismanaged the early and successful steps of the Hungarian revolt, at first denouncing its leader Imre Nagy on Radio Free Europe as a Soviet "Trojan horse," in the phrase of the Eisenhower biographer Peter Lyons. Nagy would subsequently be hanged after a secret, Soviet-dictated trial. And the Kremlin ordered massive forces in as revolutionaries prompted by American "propaganda," Lyons writes, pressured Hungary to the "right"; the new regime had suddenly threatened to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.

As the uprising was crushed, President Eisenhower even declined to impose sanctions—which would have had far less impact then, when the Soviet Union was economically isolated to a considerable extent. Ironically, at the same time, he did countenance sanctions against Britain and France to compel troop withdrawal from Egypt, which they had invaded to seize control of the Suez Canal. The sanctions continued after a cease-fire; Eisenhower was adamant: They wouldn't be lifted until the invading troops were gone. The British and French, who would soon leave, in the meantime, had to impose oil rationing.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/10/obama-s-all-eisenhower-on-russia.html