Eisenhower wins the most important war game in history
The Solarium Project and Crafting a Bipartisan Foreign Policy
Introduction: Saving the Republican Party from Itself
Vanquishing isolationist Senator Robert Taft in the 1952 Republican presidential primaries proved to be just the beginning of Eisenhower’s campaign to save the Republican Party from the unholy trinity of militarism, unilateralism, and isolationism. For while titular head of both the party and the country, Ike still had to contend with the entrenched ‘Deep State’ of his own administration, a Republican establishment that—from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on down—remained largely committed to a very different foreign policy from that of their ostensible boss.
While Republican elites remained obdurate, Eisenhower did have some significant political cards to play in his crusade to save the Republican Party from itself. The 1952 presidential election had seen Eisenhower win the largest popular vote total since FDR in 1936, gaining 442 electoral votes to a mere 89 for Adlai Stevenson, his hapless Democratic opponent. Throughout the country, the GOP ran far behind the Hero of Normandy in terms of its popularity. This political reality was to prove highly significant, as it allowed Eisenhower the leeway to come to support Truman’s foreign policy strategy in the face of fierce criticism from within his own party.
Eisenhower himself had travelled a long way politically to reach Truman’s broad position on US foreign policy. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Ike had attacked the Democrats over Korea, corruption, and Communism, seemingly promising a harder line. During and immediately after the 1952 campaign, it seemed that the Eisenhower White House would develop a very different strategy from that of Truman. Indeed, the 1952 Republican Party platform on foreign policy--written by soon-to-be Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a committed hawk—spoke of the imperative to ‘end the immoral doctrine of containment,’ instead advocating a policy of Rollback.
Rollback Doctrine was particularly beguiling at the time as the US held a brief, temporary edge over the USSR in terms of atomic weapons; for hawks in the administration such a strategic advantage must not be wasted in besting the Soviets, even if the cost was nuclear war. Eisenhower deftly refused to be boxed in. Over time, he made clear his administration was for the Rollback of Communism ‘by all peaceful means,’ which in practice meant not at all.
The Truman-Eisenhower foreign policy continuity did not emanate from a personal affinity between the two men. Once friends, in both 1948 and 1952, President Truman had gone so far as to urge a reluctant Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket. However, the 1952 presidential election had irretrievably ruined their relationship. Morally, President Truman never forgave Eisenhower for not publicly defending his former mentor General Marshall (a man Truman revered) from the despicable and utterly unfounded attacks of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Truman angrily said of his former general, ‘He (Eisenhower) has betrayed about everything I thought he stood for.’
In terms of politics, during the 1952 presidential campaign, Eisenhower made it crystal clear that he believed that the Truman administration’s excessive spending—particularly on defence, which had risen more than 300% during the its last two and a half years--was hurting the American economy, and that if elected he would clean up ‘Truman’s mess in Washington.’ Truman, in turn, sarcastically noted that, ‘General Eisenhower doesn’t know anything more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.’ Truman mused to friends at the time, ‘Poor Ike, it won’t be a bit like the army. He’ll say do this, do that, and nothing will happen.’ Well into his retirement, Truman could hardly say anything about Eisenhower without resorting to profanity.
Their joint bitterness reached such lengths that upon his inauguration day, Eisenhower refused Truman’s offer to come inside the White House and have a cup of coffee. During their short ride together from the White House to the Capitol for the swearing in, neither man said a word to the other. It is downright miraculous that Eisenhower—as ever, caring more about the country than his own feelings—came to believe that his enemy had been broadly right about foreign policy, and that he had been wrong. Historically, what mattered above all was that Truman and Eisenhower politically rejected both the hawks of the right and the doves of the left, spurning the left’s siren song that there need not be competition with the Soviets at all, as well as MacArthur’s pleas for military Armageddon in Korea.
Eisenhower, if anything, had come to espouse a more dovish version of Containment than that of the outgoing Truman administration, one more in line with what its architect--State Department veteran, George Kennan--had initially advocated. Surrounded on all sides by the hysterical anti-communist McCarthyism witch-hunts of the time, and fiercely politically attacked as the Chinese army dramatically turned the tide of the Korean War, President Truman had been steadily pushed to the right as his presidency drifted toward an end. At his behest, the hawkish Paul Nitze (and not the increasingly disillusioned Kennan) had drawn up NSC-68, which called for Containment without stressing the essential political (rather than the military) essence of the coming conflict with the Soviets that Kennan had emphasised.
After serving as acting American Ambassador to the USSR, Kennan had come to see Stalin and Soviet Communism as expansionistic, but also extremely cautious, if opportunistic. The Soviet leadership, unlike the Nazis, proceeded not according to some highly-calibrated strategic plan, instead tending to take advantage of crises as they arose. Like water looking for the path of least resistance, the USSR was constantly probing the non-Communist world for political, social, and economic weaknesses and divisions, seeking to exploit these to its benefit. However, Stalin would also halt or retreat whenever he met overly-strong resistance or risk.
In response, Kennan advocated drawing demarcation lines between the Communist and non-Communist worlds, with the US focusing on allies nearest to these lines, such as in West Germany, Iran, Greece, Japan, and South Korea. This bolstering policy should be primarily non-military in nature, as Communism thrived on economic suffering, social conflict and political chaos.
Eisenhower, in one of the greatest ‘hidden hand’ moves of his presidency, in the summer of 1953 convened a high-level war game to win over his reluctant Republican colleagues to the merits of the Containment Doctrine. Project Solarium--named for the top-floor room in the White House where initial discussions were held about the future of American foreign policy between Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles, and George Kennan--amounts to perhaps the most important strategic simulation in the history of the world. Not declassified or officially acknowledged until over 30 years later in 1985, Project Solarium amounts to the most important series of historical meetings the vast majority of Americans know absolutely nothing about.
The Solarium War Game was intended to produce a political consensus among Eisenhower’s senior national security officials over the question of the most effective strategy for dealing with Soviet expansionism. Three teams of high-level national security officials and leading foreign policy thinkers were chosen. All the players were given documents, and were tasked with assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the three schools of thought that had emerged to deal with the Soviets: Rollback, Hard Containment (per NSC-68), and Soft Containment (stressing the core political, rather than military, competition). Each team met between June-July 1953, before submitting their reports to Eisenhower as well as the National Security Council.
Here the canny Eisenhower skewed the odds; his own well-known biography should have warned the uber-hawks in the Republican Party that the deck was stacked. Eisenhower had stratospherically ascended through the army’s ranks after Pearl Harbour not because of his stellar combat record in World War I (he had none), or even due to his formidable powers as an Executive Officer in the inter-war period. Rather, he had caught the eye of Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall because he was commonly thought the star member in the army’s vital War Plans Division from December 1941 onwards.
Impressed, Marshall called on Ike to take the lead in drawing up the plan for liberating Europe; following this, Marshall offered Eisenhower the command to carry out the very plans he had drafted from Normandy onwards. War games, strategic simulations, and strategic planning were Eisenhower’s speciality, the one distinct leadership skill that had separated him from the pack of other able American army officers, thrusting him into a world historical position. It should come as little surprise that—when years later pressed by his own party over his newfound commitment to Kennan’s Containment Doctrine—Eisenhower would choose to wage his bureaucratic battle in the one venue where he was perhaps the most adept man in the world.
Ike first stacked the deck, as two out of the three teams espoused some form or other of Containment; the Rollback position favoured by Republican hawks was already a minority view even before the game had begun. Second, Paul Nitze, the hawkish, influential, defence intellectual who had moved the outgoing Truman administration to an increasingly militant stance, was excluded from the project entirely.
Having played them myself in my Washington days, it is fair to say that in my experience of high-level war games the policy conclusion is quite often determined by the quality of the specific players and teams. In sidelining the foremost Democratic Hawk, Eisenhower made it far more likely that Kennan’s team would prevail.
Team A was led by Kennan, espousing his view that Containment allowed for a primarily political competition with the Soviets. The rivalry should focus on Europe, forgoing significant military commitments elsewhere. Kennan’s strategy relied heavily on fostering American allies and alliance cohesion, the task that Eisenhower had accomplished so magnificently during World War II. The strategic goal was to prevent the Soviets from expanding into Western Europe, all the while minimising the risk of general (nuclear) war. The means to accomplish Kennan’s plan revolved primarily around using diplomacy and covert action as tools.
Team B broadly hewed to the outgoing Truman administration line, following on from the NSC-68 directive. It took a harder strategic stance vis-a-vis the USSR, relying less on global allies and more on America’s nuclear arsenal. While offering the clear prospect of military action if America’s core allies were threatened, Team B--as was true of Team A--was clearly against Rollback, going to war to liberate the already established Soviet sphere of influence. However, Team B was clearly for a more aggressive posture, being a more militarised form of Containment, threatening further Soviet aggression everywhere with massive American nuclear retaliation.
Team C were the Rollback players, hewing to Nitze’s dictum that, ‘So long as the Soviet Union exists, it will not fall apart, but must and can be shaken apart.’ Team C insisted that persistently threatening the Soviet Union with nuclear attack was an utterly acceptable method of destabilising Moscow. Ike cut them short, arguing, ‘You can’t have this type of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.’
By making the horrendous reality of nuclear war tangible to his (too often) theoretical strategists, in one intellectual stroke the president had dealt the political death blow to the Rollback Doctrine. Project Solarium forced the senior ranks of the Republican foreign and defence establishment to think through in specific detail the possibly apocalyptic consequences of Rollback and Preventive War doctrines, as many came to realise they were unworkable in the dawning nuclear age.
Once the Teams submitted their papers, Eisenhower used their work product to advance his bureaucratic agenda of securing Kennan’s brand of Containment as the the bipartisan position of the American foreign policy establishment, as well as that of both major political parties. Following the conclusion of the Solarium War Game, Eisenhower went out of his way to praise the work of Team A in general, and Kennan in particular, which is striking given that Kennan had just been abruptly fired by Dulles only a few weeks before. Eisenhower was bureaucratically using the war game to signal to all his embrace of Kennan’s philosophy.
Summarising from Team A’s assessments, Ike noted that: 1) The Soviet Union was a long-term rather than an imminent threat, and one that would wane if the US acted prudently. 2) The key immediate strategic worry was the increase in the number of Soviet nuclear weapons and their improved capacity to deliver them. 3) America had to steer between the twin evils of stoking public alarm—which could force excessive military counter-preparations, making a cycle of crisis and nuclear war far more likely—all the while avoiding complacency, being too passive, which in itself might encourage Soviet adventurism, as had happened over Korea.
Coming down firmly on the side of Containment, Eisenhower concluded, summarising the results of Project Solarium by saying the US must maintain a system of alliances, thereby limiting the Soviet bloc, while maintaining military readiness. America must pursue the Containment strategy in close conjunction with its allies, giving the whole policy the political colouration that Kennan had argued for in the first place.
The most useful strategy for the US beyond nuclear deterrence, Eisenhower summarised, would be political and even educational, using soft power in conveying the basic notion that capitalism, democracy, and human rights were superior attributes for the rest of the world to adopt than was a very ugly Stalinism. In time (as remarkably proved to be the case), the president believed that the populations of Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union would come to firmly believe this. After this, the death of Communism could not be far away.
On October 30, 1953, the survey report from the Solarium War Game formed the basis for the adoption of NSC Directive 162/2, solidifying that Containment was the long-term strategic doctrine of the United States in manging the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. It led the Eisenhower administration to emphasise alliance building, even as it augmented America’s nuclear arsenal, all the while prioritising that non-military means were to be the primary tools for containing aggressive Soviet behaviour.
A past master at building consensus, Eisenhower had adroitly used Project Solarium as a political weapon to rally support for Containment in his own sceptical party, to correct the Truman administration’s drift towards hawkishness, and to see off the existential threat that Rollback Doctrine—a policy that would have eventually made nuclear war almost a certainty--posed to the world.
Crucially, with the success of the Solarium Project, both the Democratic and Republican Parties coalesced around the Containment Doctrine, a remarkable record of foreign policy longevity (for a democracy, no less) that directly led to ultimate triumph in the Cold War. For the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed, committing suicide much as Kennan had predicted with uncanny accuracy 45 years before. Rarely in history has such analytical brilliance led to such a wise foreign policy being pursued for such a long period of time. There are many heroes in this story, but surely a lion’s share of the credit goes to Eisenhower, who skilfully birthed this miraculous foreign policy consensus.