Opinion: Another Republican prez and another open-ended war

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This is an image of the endpapers from Waging Peace, the second volume of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s White House memoirs. (Click on the image for a much, much larger version if you’re curious about the details.) The book provides ample insights, in recognizable Eisenhowerese, of Ike’s diplomatic efforts to counter Soviet expansion and build U.S. alliances. The map is probably mislabeled: The president wasn’t really in search of peace so much as in search of containment, and his travels were more about building a chain of alliances against the Russians than about promoting some kind of We Are the World vision of peace.

How well did it work? Dig the gap-toothed chain of U.S. alliances, hemming in the Kremlin:

(American allies, quite a few of whom turned out to be more temporary than expected, in shades of green--click for larger image.)

I have nothing to add to these artifacts, except that it might be interesting to stack these travels and this web of friendships against President Bush’s versions of the same in the GWOT (where so far we haven’t managed to find such a centralized and encirclable enemy).