By Caroline B. Glick      
During his tenure as President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld often likened the administration's foreign policy decisions to those of the Truman administration during the first years of the Cold War. As President George W. Bush makes his way to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states with a stated agenda of advancing the goal of Palestinian statehood, it is worth examining president Truman's achievements and comparing them with those of President Bush.
President Harry S Truman was in some ways an accidental president. Elected vice president in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fourth term in office, he assumed the presidency when Roosevelt died in April 1945, a month before the Allied victory in Europe and four months before the surrender of Imperial Japan.
As the war wound down, Truman was quick to understand the threat that Soviet imperialism and communist ideology posed to US national security. A world dominated by communism was a world in which America, as the beacon of human freedom and liberty, could not be safe. Consequently, he recognized that the rising Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US would be the defining contest of ...   more »