In the UK, there is an inquiry into the Covid pandemic, but not the decline of the defence budget since the 1980s. I am not calling for show trials, quite, though it is striking what gets scrutinised and what doesn’t. And there hasn’t been enough of a reckoning with the dereliction of those who governed before. The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isn’t tenable without hard power. In another 18 months, depending on how Americans vote, you might not have to. Imagine Ukraine right now without a committed US. But the past 18 months have been a sublime education in its uses. The result, an empire in all but name, has had costs. Truman set himself a harder task: to maintain a forward US posture during peace time. In ending American isolation, his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had the “advantage” of a world war. It is Truman who made the foundational decisions of our world: to keep the US in Europe after 1945, to garrison vulnerable places even farther afield, to reduce industrial tariffs. The best effort, the “rules-based international order”, is terrible. Since the last decade, when Donald Trump won the presidency, Vladimir Putin took Crimea and Xi Jinping set China on a more assertive path, liberals have tried to put a name to what we are defending from these revisionist leaders. Apart from its over-reliance on dialogue for exposition, and its naivete about the chances of total Axis surrender, this account of the father of Nato is the most jarring thing in a fine film whose three hours seldom drag. Was he meant to whistle to work? Harry Truman, to whom it fell to use the “gadget”, is the more dramatic figure, precisely because he made what might be the most history-altering executive decision since Pontius Pilate without much in the way of outward qualms.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s biopic of Oppenheimer gives the 33rd US president just one scene, in which he shambles around as a provincial buffoon who can’t say Nagasaki right. The fact that J Robert Oppenheimer agonised over his part in the creation of the atomic bomb is not interesting.
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