Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [334]
I was a junior in college when President Truman left office. He was deeply unpopular. Truman was a fierce partisan and rather cantankerous man. But what I have come to understand—and what came back vividly to me during my visit—was how central a role he and his administration had in the international challenges of the second half of the twentieth century.
As World War II ended and America entered the Cold War, it fell to the Truman administration to fashion an entirely new construct for an uncertain era. Largely overlooked and certainly underappreciated at the time, his administration crafted many of the institutions and policies that proved crucial to fighting and prevailing in the long conflict against the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan, for example, provided needed resources to the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and helped to keep them from sliding into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The containment strategy was pursued over many decades. Many Truman-era international institutions, designed to buttress the democracies of the world and encourage the rise of others, are still with us today: the World Bank, NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization of American States, among them. At home, the Truman administration created the NSC, the CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency, and merged the Navy and War departments into the Department of Defense. All of that occurred at the inflection point at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations had similar opportunities to fashion new policies and institutions for a new era: The inflection point at the end of the Cold War and the twenty-first-century challenges of the information age.
When I returned to Washington I put these thoughts together in a memorandum for President Bush: “Today the world requires new international organizations tailored to our new circumstances.”16 I noted that many of the most pressing threats we faced were global and transnational in scope—terrorism, proliferation, cybercrime, narcotics, piracy, hostage taking, and criminal gangs. By their nature, they could not be dealt with successfully by any one nation—not even the United States—and, as such, required the cooperation of many nations.
I believed that in important ways, existing international institutions—including some whose origins dated back to the days of FDR and Truman—were proving inadequate to the times. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were working to bring development funds to impoverished countries, but a nontrivial portion failed to reach the intended people because of inefficiency and corruption. I was also thinking of the United Nations, which was heavy on anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes and comparatively light on accomplishments. NATO, too, had its shortcomings. Because it was designed as a European defense organization against the Soviets, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did not have linkages with some of the world’s important democracies outside of Europe, such as Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Australia. NATO also required unanimity among twenty-eight member nations that included some occasionally contrarian members, making it difficult to deal with new challenges. The demographics of Western Europe—with aging populations and declining investments in their militaries—did not promise a robust alliance.
I suggested that new international organizations might be needed to bring competence in areas where existing organizations proved to be less well suited to the twenty-first century—areas such as developing and utilizing quick-reaction