WASHINGTON: No matter how polarised Washington becomes, there is still one Democrat Republicans love: Harry Truman. Last December, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared the Bush administration’s democracy promotion efforts ‘consistent with the proud tradition of American foreign policy, especially such recent presidents as Harry Truman’. Last weekend President Bush devoted his West Point commencement address to an extended analogy between himself and the 33rd president, invoking Truman no fewer than 17 times. Conservative commentators are fond of the analogy, too. Indeed, it is a virtual article of faith on the contemporary right that today’s conservatives — not today’s liberals — are the true heirs of the anti-totalitarian tradition with which we associate Truman’s name.

The truth is rather different. Bush and Rice are correct that Truman saw tyranny as a threat to world peace and believed in resisting it, by means that included force. At West Point, Bush quoted Truman’s famous declaration in his March 1947 speech proposing military aid to the besieged governments of Greece and Turkey: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

But there are other Truman classics that Bush conveniently overlooked. For instance: “We all have to recognise, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” Truman did not believe merely in promoting democracy and peace; he believed that doing so required powerful international institutions, which could invest American power with the credibility that the Soviets lacked.

In the years immediately after the Second World War, the United States encased itself in a web of such bodies — from the United Nations and Nato to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organisation). And Truman was frank in recognising that such institutions gave weaker countries an influence over American actions. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, “It was not that the Americans lacked the capacity to force their allies into line . . . [but] what is surprising is how rarely this happened; how much effort the United States put into persuading — quite often deferring to — its Nato partners.”

Bush, by contrast, more than any president in recent history, has sought to liberate the United States from international treaties and institutions — from the Kyoto global warming treaty to the International Criminal Court to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

To be sure, even Bill Clinton sometimes had trouble getting international agreements through Congress. But in the Bush administration, opposing infringements on US sovereignty has become a cardinal foreign policy principle. In Bush’s view, American power legitimises itself — we don’t need to listen to other countries because sooner or later they will realise that we were right and they were wrong.

Had Bush been around in the late 1940s, he might well have accused Truman of seeking a ‘permission slip’ before defending the United States. Indeed, some conservatives said almost exactly that at the time. It is they — not Truman — who are Bush’s true ideological forefathers.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service