That is no longer a talking point.
It is a joke. And a bad one at that.
Eisenhower understood that bullies often cannot be deterred without threatening a response that would be catastrophic for one and all. This is especially the case when the aggressor cares much more about the victim than we do. Nikita Khrushchev could not afford to lose Hungary, just as Putin believes that he cannot afford to lose Crimea to a Western-oriented Ukrainian government. That's no secret. Crimea was historically Russian, serves as the home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, and satisfies Moscow's age-old drive for warm-water ports. A thug like Putin responds to a threat of this magnitude the only way he knows how -- with brute force. The idea that a more resolute American president would have made Putin stay his hand seems fanciful, on the order of "Who lost China?" or all the other places weak-willed American leaders are said to have lost to the communists. Today's version is "Who lost Benghazi?" -- or Syria.
Eisenhower felt confident that, in the end, the Soviets would not dance on the grave of the West, but that it would turn out the other way around. I suspect that Obama thinks about Putin in much the same way. Those who sneer at Obama now laud Putin as a strategic mastermind, playing Risk, as FP contributing editor Will Inboden puts it, while Obama plays Candy Land. Yet Putin has turned Russia into Saudi Arabia with nukes, a petrostate incapable of exporting anything that doesn't come out of the ground. He's playing with a switchblade while the rest of the world learns how to operate a laser.
As a foreign-policy president, Obama deserves to be compared to Eisenhower at least as much as he does to Carter. Like Obama, Eisenhower inherited a vast military budget that he viewed as an unsustainable burden on the national economy. He tried, not always successfully, to do more, or as much, with less. (In Maximalist, Stephen Sestanovich describes both as "retrenchment" presidents.) Obama's great goal in foreign policy is to wind down inherited conflicts -- including the war on terror, as I wrote last week -- in order to give his activist domestic agenda a fighting chance.
