346 e lusive v ictories
expand the war into Cambodia in spring 1970 revived the antiwar
movement because the military operation violated public expectations
of a steady disengagement from the war. Th e Iraq War likewise became
a quagmire to which Bush reacted far too slowly, until mounting crit-
icism and the electoral backlash against his party forced his hand. Much
as it is diffi cult for presidents to admit, opposition to their war policy
may be constructive, raising a red fl ag that the policy itself is badly
conceived and/or conducted.
Wartime presidents also have compiled a mixed record in their dip-
lomatic eff orts. Lincoln faced a diplomatic challenge unlike that of his
modern successors: his main objective was to keep other nations out of
his war, where later presidents have usually sought to enlist allies. He
managed to convince Great Britain and France not to recognize the
Confederacy. Roosevelt excelled as a wartime diplomat, capitalizing on
the leverage that American economic and military power gave him.
Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and Obama did not achieve critical wartime
diplomatic goals. Th e fi rst two met with extraordinary frustration in
their dealings with the Vietnamese governments in Hanoi and Saigon,
unable to bludgeon the former or buy off the latter to accept a peace
agreement on American terms. In the end Nixon abandoned the Th ieu
government as the price for extricating the United States from a war in
which it had ceased to have a meaningful stake. Bush, unlike his father,
failed to secure UN backing for military action against Saddam Hussein
or to put together a broad-based multinational coalition either for the
invasion or the occupation that followed. As with Johnson and Nixon
in their dealings with Saigon, moreover, Bush discovered that the
United States exercised little leverage over client regimes in which it
invests its prestige. Successive Iraqi prime ministers operated on their
own political calculus, which assigned little weight to an American
president’s wishes or timetable. Obama has encountered similar
obstructionism in Kabul and Islamabad.
Of all their non-military responsibilities, presidents have done worst
in preparing for peace, the most vexing of all wartime tasks. Important
though battlefi eld success may be as a step toward achieving the political
goals that a president has framed, military triumph alone has never
been enough. Presidents usually have expansive political goals that
require steps beyond an enemy’s surrender or his acceptance of peace