Learning from the Cold War.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: Editorial

POLICYMAKERS in the Clinton Administration, frustrated by their peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti, have lamented that they are facing a new world with new rules and little guidance from the past. According to The New York Times, the President's advisers consider themselves pioneers, "groping their way toward new principles in a post-Cold War world." As one senior State Department official put it, "Every one of these situations involves a lot of imponderables. It's not easy to define our national interest, to decide when to intervene, to see all the consequences of intervention, to know when to declare victory and end the intervention."

Too many policymakers may perceive the Cold War in retrospect as a conflict with clearly defined rules of the game. The Cold War was no such event, and its rules, such as they were, often were ambiguous. They involved a complex calculus of interests, threats, and risks. In Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1940s, Truman Administration officials felt American vital interests were threatened by Soviet domination of Europe and the oil fields of the Middle East, so they fashioned a response short of outright military intervention. They drew the lines, built alliances, and made firm commitments.

Other challenges were not so simple and required a more measured, if not ambiguous, response. When the communists triumphed in the Chinese civil war in 1949, Pres. Harry S. Truman and his advisers concluded that military intervention made little sense. In their view, the risks simply outweighed the serious threat to America's vital interests.

After the French were defeated by the Vietnamese communists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Pres. Dwight Eisenhower was confronted with a problem as vexing as the one Truman encountered in China. He had to ask himself: Did the U.S. have any vital interests in Southeast Asia? Was America confronting a serious threat of communist expansion or simply a nationalist insurgency? And what was the probability of success if the U.S. were to intervene militarily? Wisely, Eisenhower followed Truman's example in China and eschewed such a step. Tragically for the L.S., his successors followed a different course.

When America succeeded in navigating through a Cold War crisis. it was a consequence of senior policymakers balancing interests. threats, and risks; choosing the proper instrument of power; sensing the public mood; and avoiding precipitous military...