In a public letter to a New Hampshire newspaper in early 1948, General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, then Chief of Staff of the Army, poured cold water on the burgeoning movement, spearheaded by prominent U.S. citizens and politicians, to persuade the country’s most preeminent soldier to enter politics beginning with the state’s Republican primary in March of the same year. “[L]ifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and over-riding reason, [should] abstain from seeking high political office,” the general emphatically stated. 

Yet less than three years later, in January 1951, such an overriding reason emerged in the nation’s presidential political fray of 1952. The Grand Old Party (GOP) gathered around Robert A. Taft, the Republican Senator from Ohio. Nicknamed “Mr. Republican,” Taft was the leader of the party’s nationalist Old Right or Republican Old Guard, principally known for their strong anti-statist and anti-interventionist positions in domestic and foreign policies perhaps most evident in their opposition to New Deal liberalism and U.S. entry into World War II. Eisenhower, in April 1951, had assumed his role as the first NATO supreme commander. Taft’s known hostility to NATO in conjunction with public opposition in the country to sending U.S. ground troops to Europe, however, concerned Eisenhower that whatever he would accomplish diplomatically and militarily abroad would be nullified politically at home. Eisenhower’s sentiment was reinforced by some of his closest friends, who were alarmed at the prospect of a Taft presidency. “We cannot let the isolationists gain control of government if we are to endure as a free people over the years,” General Lucius Clay wrote to Ike, stressing in a separate note that “nothing accomplished there [NATO] would have any real permanency,” should the senator from Ohio enter the White House. 

Eisenhower invited Taft to a tète-à-téte at the Pentagon in early 1951 to convince him of the need for a NATO buildup to confront the growing Soviet menace on the old continent. According to Eisenhower’s account, he asked Taft whether he and his Old Right congressional associates would support a bipartisan policy of collective security for the United States and Europe. If Taft were to answer “yes,” then Eisenhower would remain in Europe as supreme commander for the “next years,” if “no” then “NATO would be set back, and I would probably be back in the United States,” the general recalled. Taft declined, arguing that then U.S. President Harry Truman had no constitutional right to send troops to Europe. The conversation, Eisenhower said, “aroused my fears that isolationism was stronger in the Congress than I had previously suspected.” After the meeting, he tore up a prepared statement disavowing politics. Eisenhower later claimed that this marked the beginning of his presidential ambitions. 

Yet Taft was no longer an isolationist. While it was true that the senator, elected to the U.S. Senate ten months before the outbreak of World War II, was one of the leading voices of the nationalist anti-interventionist wing of the GOP in the early 1940s—notably opposing the Lend-Lease Act of 1941—by the time of the “long talk” between him and Eisenhower in 1952, his foreign policy position had matured and shifted from isolationism to what realist international relations scholars have labeled “offshore balancing”—though neither Taft nor any other policymakers labeled it as such. An offshore balancing strategy recognizes spheres of influence, regional balances of power, and pushes for burden-shifting away from the United States to its allies and partners. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt summarized the strategy thus in 2016: “Instead of policing the world, the United States would encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary.” Conversely, Hal Brands offers a more critical definition: “In its simplest form, offshore balancing envisions slashing U.S. force posture and alliance commitments overseas, and undertaking a market retrenchment in U.S. policy more broadly. Its guiding premise is that such retrenchment can lead to greater security at a lesser cost—that less, in other words can really be more.” At the core, an offshore balancing strategy for the United States means maintaining regional hegemony in the Western hemisphere while maintaining a balance of power in Asia and Europe, chiefly through allied nations buoyed by U.S. military aid, thus preventing any other great power from dominating these geo-strategically important regions.

Taft pushed exactly such a strategy in the 1950s, although never formally naming it so. Inspired by the lessons of Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, the senator proposed a continental defense and selective containment strategy that connected key strategic points across the globe underpinned by U.S. air and naval power, all reinforced by balance-of-power politics and the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons—in short, an offshore balancing strategy. As Colin Dueck in his study of Republican foreign policy since World War II notes, by 1951, “Taft had come a long way from his prior ‘isolationism.’” Given his eminent standing within the GOP, the 1952 Republican primary was the only window for such a strategy at the national political level as an alternative to the bipartisan internationalist consensus and containment strategy that emerged following the 1947 announcement of the Truman Doctrine. Unfortunately, Taft poorly promoted his vision. Given ongoing debates about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy ranging from “a new isolationism” to continued “liberal hegemony,” it may be opportune to reexamine Taft’s ideas from the 1950s.

“A Foreign Policy for Americans”

Taft’s transformation from isolationist to an advocate for offshore balancing is best illustrated by analyzing the only book the senator wrote in his lifetime: A Foreign Policy for Americans. Published in November 1951, the book, according to the author of the authoritative Taft biography, Mr. Republican, is “the most reliable single guide to his thinking.” In it, Taft laid out his blueprint for a new global U.S. strategy and defense policy to confront the Soviet Union while keeping defense spending and global U.S. commitments relatively low. Taft’s principal concern was that U.S. over-commitment abroad would lead to the erosion of limited government at home and, most importantly for Taft, and increase executive authority. 

The book was partially influenced by a great congressional debate over Truman’s decision in the fall of 1950 to commit several U.S. divisions to a new NATO defense force in Europe and overall increases in defense spending amidst the Korean War. U.S. military planners in the late 1940s and early 1950s were aiming to create a 76th division NATO army, including forty-five hundred aircraft, by 1957, with a sizeable U.S. contingent. (The eventual U.S. contribution would be the 7th Army.) 

Taft’s principal concern was that such a force committed the United States to a land war in Europe and Asia. “What I object to is undertaking to fight that battle (…) primarily on the vast land areas of the continent of Europe or the continent of Asia, where we are at the greatest possible disadvantage in a war with Russia,” Taft writes. “The first principle of military strategy is not to fight on the enemy’s chosen battleground, where he has his greatest strength.” This was also informed by recent U.S. experiences in North Korea. Exactly a year prior to the book’s publication date in November 1950, the 8th U.S. Army and its South Korean allies were routed by Chinese and North Korean troops at the Yalu River on the border between North Korea and China and were forced to retreat to below the 38th parallel bisecting the Korean Peninsula. 

Yet, Taft’s reluctance to commit ground troops did not mean abandoning allies. Taft, noting that the United States is “of course, interested in the defense of Europe” emphasized that it is ultimately within their national interest for European countries to provide “not only the bulk of the troops but also the bulk of the interest and initiative (…) [but] finally take over the responsibility”—a refrain heard to this day. Aware of his reputation as an isolationist, Taft reiterated, however, that he did not agree “with those who think we can completely abandon the rest of the world and rely solely on the defense of this continent.” He merely questioned those who had equated not sending U.S. ground troops to the old continent with “running out on Europe” despite the United States having “definitely agreed to go to the defense of these countries if they are attacked.” What Taft suggested instead was an offshore balancing strategy for the United States that does not rely on sending large ground forces overseas as part of long-term defense pacts, but rather relies on U.S. air and maritime power, paired with the United States’ burgeoning nuclear arsenal, to deter and, if need be, defend against Communist military actions. 

At the core was the idea of the United States acting as an independent arbiter of power similar to Great Britain, which “brought about the balanced peace of the last half of the 19th century.” Driving home his point about ground troops, Taft also noted that London “seldom committed any considerable number of British land troops to continental warfare (…).” Instead, it relied on its powerful Royal Navy. The United States, even beyond its considerable naval fleet, would principally rely on the nuclear-capable air force, “the best possible defense for the United States” and “also the best deterrent to war.” This “air-atomic” force, as he called it in a January 1951 Senate speech, would have global reach and would act as the prime deterrent against Communist aggression.

In addition, rather than relying solely on NATO, the United States would focus on building “centers of strength”—key allied nations around the periphery of the Eurasian landmass, centered on three strategic regions: Great Britain and France in Europe; Greece and Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean; and Japan and Taiwan in East Asia. These centers of strengths would prevent the Soviet Union or China from ever achieving regional hegemony over Europe or Asia and would receive both U.S. economic assistance and arms shipments. However, he envisioned the relationships with these countries not be based on long-term defense pacts, but rather ad hoc alliances as they existed in nineteenth-century Europe. Notably, Taft also thought the military defense of Germany and the entire Middle East region as practically impossible for the United States and fiscally wasteful. Yet, fueled by a militant anti-communism, Taft suggested any nation that needed “to resist aggression from without” or battle “armed Communist forces within” would be eligible for direct military aid. Moreover, Taft thought that superior air and naval forces would enable the U.S. to bring all of the world’s island nations under the U.S. air-naval-nuclear umbrella: “A superiority in air and sea forces throughout the world can achieve other purposes than mere defense. It can protect all island countries, Africa and South America.” 

Taft decidedly did not rule out the deployment of U.S. ground troops around the globe, but foreseeing a more limited role: “A land army is necessary for the defense of air bases, further defense of islands near the continental shores and for such occasional extensions of action into Europe, Asia, or Africa as promised success in selected areas.” In congressional debates in early 1951, Taft also called for a U.S. Army size of 1.6 million men (the size of the U.S. Army in 1950 was just under 600,000 men). However, he was adamant about the avoidance of land war against the Soviet Union and Red China. Rather, the United States would act as a balancer around the periphery of Eurasia, deploying its military ground forces selectively and only in conjunction with strong allied forces rather than shouldering the principle burden in ground campaigns, as had been the case in the Korean War. In essence, this was an asymmetric approach to offset the Soviet Union’s principal strength as a land power underpinned by Taft’s fundamental belief that the United States should be “maintaining a free hand to fight a war (…) in such a manner and in such conditions which are changing so rapidly in the modern world.” 

When it was published, A Foreign Policy for Americans received a number of favorable reviews. General Douglas MacArthur, for example, called the book “masterful.” Yet, it overall failed to impress. While Time Magazine noted in a review that Taft could no longer be called an isolationist, it added that he “lacks any dynamic sense that United States efforts can help make the world situation less unsatisfactory.” A review in the Dayton News noted that the book revealed Taft had only reached “an intellectual acceptance of limited internationalism. On the surface is a layer of reasoned thought which is genuine, but which is extremely thin. Scratch it every so lightly, and Taft’s emotions are laid bare.” 

One problem was that the book was fiercely partisan, which resulted in numerous contradictions. For example, despite advocating an offshore balancing strategy and the avoidance of land war in Asia, Taft criticized the Truman administration’s limited military support to South Korea. He also repeatedly criticized NATO, the United Nations and other institutions, while still professing his support, albeit reluctantly, for them. The Dayton News review called this Taft’s old predilection of “yes, but.” Another problem was that the senator was a fierce ideologue and attacked those who saw the Soviet Union as constituting a “purely military threat” insisting that the Soviets, once militarily deterred, would turn to “propaganda and infiltration” with “the final battle between liberty and communism (…) fought in the minds of men.” It is thus not unsurprising that Taft was not only a strong supporter of McCarthyism and advocated purging the federal bureaucracy of communists, but also advocated sabotage and infiltration of communist countries. 

Looking at his offshore balancing strategy, Taft’s book also revealed various inconsistencies.

First, the United States was already committed to the defense of Western Germany and was an occupying power. Taft wrote that NATO essentially meant the “extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Europe” and acknowledged that withdrawing from Germany would practically be inviting the “communization” of the entire country. “We have several divisions of troops in Germany, and if a war arose we would inevitably be involved in that war.” Second, his offshore balancing strategy would still depend on the maintenance of a host of foreign U.S. military bases, which hardly limited the U.S. military footprint around the world. Third, Taft’s de-facto advocacy for unilateralism and his suggestion that the U.S. become a global balancer while avoiding long-term defense commitments would have meant the end of NATO.

Unsurprisingly, it was this fear that cemented Eisenhower’s decision to contest Taft’s nomination in 1952. As James T. Patterson writes in Mr. Republican, Taft’s book could have spurred a serious debate about the direction of U.S. foreign policy, especially his belief that the United States’ role in the world had its limits: “Thus he doggedly insisted on holding military spending, on giving greater attention to domestic needs, on controlling presidential discretion in dispatching troops, and on questioning the wisdom of long-term defense pacts.” Yet as Patterson laments: “The trouble was that he did not stop there. Instead, he called for a militant pose in Asia and demanded worldwide propaganda, including infiltration of communist lands. He persisted in adopting a moralistic stance about communism, especially in Asia. (…) Had he avoided these inconsistencies—which had co-existed in his thought for many years—he might have stimulated the real debate over foreign policy that the nation needed in 1951.” 

In that sense, even prior to the 1952 primary, Taft’s offshore balancing strategy stood a very small chance of being adopted by the United States given the multiple inconsistencies and contradictions in Taft’s outline of this new strategy. Nonetheless, the publication of the book itself, the only book that Taft ever wrote, should be seen as evidence of the systematic approach the senator intended to take when considering the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

The 1952 Primary 

Taft wrote A Foreign Policy for Americans to tout his foreign policy credentials as he had clear plans of entering the 1952 presidential contest. The book was published in November 1952, barely a month after Taft announced his candidacy for the presidency on October 16. Taft pledged to “bring liberty rather than socialism” to the White House, yet he reserved his biggest criticism of the Truman administration when it came to foreign policy, vowing not to repeat the Democrats’ “fatal mistakes” that led to the “buildup of Russia and the Korean war and other disastrous occurrences.” Political pundits knew that the Republican primary would boil down to a showdown between Eisenhower and Taft.

Throughout most of 1951, Taft had dismissed Eisenhower’s candidacy—Ike only officially entered the race in June 1952—but once it became clear that Eisenhower was committed, he attempted to dissuade the General by downplaying the differences between them in matters of foreign and defense policy. In October 1951, he notably publicly stated that he would support the stationing of six U.S. Army divisions to Europe or “even some reasonable addition.” In January 1952, he announced: “I have written a letter which has been shown to the General assuring him that I am anxious that the European Project be carried through completion . . . I can see no difference between us on the subject.” The latter statement infuriated many Taft supporters within the Old Right.

Eisenhower’s broad appeal among Republican primary voters quickly became evident. Despite not officially running, the General was on the ballot in the March 1952 New Hampshire primary, and without personally campaigning achieved a crushing victory over Taft. “I probably will lose the presidential preference primary,” Taft confided in private. Yet GOP party bosses and other supporters encouraged him to stay in the race. He was still considered to be the frontrunner for the nomination. By May of that year, following a number of primary victories including Wisconsin and his home state of Ohio, Taft had accumulated a lead in delegates over Eisenhower.

In his primary campaign, Taft focused on the future direction of U.S. foreign policy, liberally citing his book during campaign events. He was at pains to distance himself from his mentor and standard-bearer of the Old Right, former President Herbert Hoover, who in December 1950 in a widely heard radio broadcast criticized the Truman doctrine and the country’s interventionist foreign policy. Hoover declaimed that the United States should become the “Gibraltar of Western Civilization” in the Western Hemisphere, protected by superior air and naval power, and abandon collective security in Asia and Europe. “I don’t believe that anyone who is actually responsible for foreign policy in early 1953 could at the time take as drastic action as you propose,” Taft told Hoover in early 1952. While Taft continued to express his willingness to dispatch U.S. troops abroad, he was also adamant about not committing ground troops to Vietnam, where the French were battling an insurgency. “No United States troops should be sent to that strife-torn region,” he said in January of 1952. Rather than solely advocating a foreign policy of restraint, however, his anti-communist fervor often got the better of him, and he time and again appealed for a “crusade of propaganda for liberty throughout the world,” seemingly contradicting his own offshore balancing strategy. 

In the end, foreign policy proved to be his undoing. In the April 1952 issue of The Atlantic, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identified Taft as a member of a group of “new isolationists” and as a “man of transition trying hard to come to terms with the modern world.” Taft’s foreign policy constituted the “last convulsive outbreak of an old nostalgia.” Taft found it impossible to shake off the label of isolationist, which was effectively applied by his political opponents to discredit his foreign policy ideas. His support of McCarthyism also sowed deep concern. Harper wrote that his pro-McCarthy stance, along with his foreign policy, showed that “he was capable of taking to demagogy and doing it with breathtaking abandon.” By the time of the Republican Convention in Chicago in July 1952, Taft had accumulated 530 candidates to Eisenhower’s 427. The convention was hotly contested. Taft supporters controlled the Republican leadership including the Republican National Committee. Republican leaders engaged in chicanery that became known as the “Texas Steal” to seat pro-Taft delegations from Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana despite the overwhelming public support for Eisenhower in those states. Following the adaptation of a so-called Fair Play Amendment to convention rules, made possible by Eisenhower supporters striking a deal with Senator Richard Nixon for California’s votes, the delegates from the three states were awarded to Eisenhower enabling the General to win the nomination.

In September 1952, Taft officially endorsed Eisenhower for the presidency, noting in the statement that he could not “agree with all of General Eisenhower’s views on the foreign policy to be pursued in Europe and the rest of the world,” but qualifying that these differences were only ones “of degree.” Notably, Taft also expressed his skepticism regarding Eisenhower’s announcement that he “would lead a great crusade for freedom in America and freedom in the world,” and his call for the “liberation” of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Taft cautioned: “I agree that liberation should be our goal, but I can’t see us starting a war for that purpose.” Taft in all likelihood would have lost to either one of the Democratic candidates. In a June 1952 Gallup poll, “Eisenhower was favored over Stevenson in a trial heat by 59 to 31 percent, and over Kefauver by 55 to 35 percent. Both Democrats led Taft, Kefauver by 50 to 41 percent, Stevenson by 45 to 44 percent.” Consequently, it goes without saying that even with a Taft primary victory, offshore balancing would likely not have been adopted as a national security strategy.

Once Eisenhower was installed in the White House, Taft was at loggerheads with the administration over its refusal to cut defense spending and its endorsement of Truman’s containment strategy and internationalist outlook. He consequently urged a “complete reconsideration” of the United States foreign and defense policies, yet to no avail: The Eisenhower White House continued the Truman administration’s containment strategy and its commitment to collective defense in Europe and continuing the buildup of the U.S. 7th Army there. Even the 1953 “New Look” emphasizing nuclear weapons over conventional capabilities did not impact the increase of American troop levels in Europe. Taft’s only token victory was his push for the installment of “air and sea power champions as new chiefs of staff,” as Patterson notes. Yet, as Colin Dueck notes, Taft and Eisenhower had a much more common vision of foreign policy than was appreciated at the time: “They agreed, for example, on the need to keep a tight lid on foreign aid, defense spending, and expensive new commitments abroad, while pursuing a vigorously anti-Communist foreign policy. Both were attracted to the strategic uses of atomic airpower, in order to keep costs down (…).” 

In early 1953, Taft restated one of the core tenets of his offshore balancing strategy: instead of relying on NATO, it might be more advisable to focus on “arming the British and French to create centers of strength against the Russians.” Taft was diagnosed with cancer in May of the same year. That same month, his son Robert Jr., on his behalf, delivered Taft’s last major public address at a conference. In it, Taft restated the central tenets outlined in A Foreign Policy for Americans. First and foremost, he outlined his opposition to committing U.S. land forces to a war in Asia and Europe. He also reiterated his doubts about NATO. “I have always been sceptic of the military practicability of NATO,” Taft said, adding that he harbored doubts how “United States ground forces could effectively defend Europe.” Instead, he emphasized that the responsibility for the defense of Europe should rest with the Europeans. Recognizing a perceived global threat, however, he granted the imperative to stop international communism “where it occurs and where it is within our means to stop it” (emphasis added). In this regard, he would differ markedly from the New Right Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who not only advocated for substantial increases in defense spending but also wanted to roll back communism and did not shrink from threatening a (nuclear) war to do so. In the end, Taft wanted to preserve for the United States “a completely free hand” in foreign policy in line with his idea of the United States acting as a balancer underpinned by air and naval superiority and nuclear weapons. 

Conclusion 

The 1952 Republican Primary was the last time that a leading GOP presidential candidate offered a serious alternative vision to the bipartisan containment policy, principally centered around NATO in Europe and liberal interventionism, until the end of the Cold War in 1989. That alternative, outlined by Sen. Robert A. Taft, and identified in this article as offshore balancing, aimed to offer the United States more flexibility in dealing with the perceived growing geostrategic threat emerging from the Communist states of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Taft, in his book A Foreign Policy for Americans, called for a selective containment strategy, built on regional centers of strength on the periphery of the Eurasian landmass, protected by superior U.S. nuclear-capable air and naval power. These centers of strengths would prevent the Soviet Union or China from ever achieving regional hegemony over Europe or Asia. U.S. ground forces would only be committed as a last resort. In the end, Taft’s idea would have been politically unfeasible and militarily perhaps even ill-advised. “The senator never recognized the value of NATO’s American divisions and never understood the necessity of a balanced force deterrent to Soviet aggression,” Clarence E. Wunderlin concludes in his biography of Taft. As we now know, however, the Soviet Union never had any intention of starting a military conflict with the West in Central Europe. 

Despite his track record in the 1940s, Taft decidedly was no isolationist by the time he ran for president in 1952. Eisenhower and his supporters used the term out of political expediency and to discredit him. To this day, the isolationist label has largely stuck with the senator. For example, in his 2018 book, The Age of Eisenhower, the historian William I. Hitchcock introduces Taft as the “recognized leader of the isolationist faction” in January 1951. (Taft has also been cast as “quasi-isolationist.”) This was partially the result of his own historical record, his inconsistencies in pronouncing his policy positions, but also the result of a quickly growing consensus that emerged among the post-war foreign policy elite in the United States equating doubts about the NATO alliance and the stationing of a substantial number of ground troops to Europe and Asia as tantamount to isolationism and appeasement.

Taft was thus an imperfect messenger for a new U.S. global strategy. Fatally, he had fallen out of step with his times. As Patterson notes: “Fearful of commitments abroad, he reflected broad currents of thought about foreign policy more suited to the 1920s—or even the late 1960s than to the frightening years spanned by Hitler and Stalin.” Colin Dueck adds: “Perhaps the best one can say is that Taft represented with genuine conviction an older tradition of small-town, midwestern, conservative non-intervention whose passing was not altogether beneficial for the United States. Taft was a useful corrective. He never stopped warning of the dangers of overextension abroad, or concomitant risks to limited government at home.” 

A more nuanced interaction with Taft’s case for offshore balancing would perhaps have been of benefit to Washington back then as now as many of the problems that Taft foresaw with a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy, notably allied burden-sharing and excessive defense spending, exist to this day. As we enter a new decade and debate the future direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is then perhaps useful, if not urgent, to revisit Taft’s world vision, despite his failure to trigger the foreign policy debate that the country needed in 1951. As the 34th president of the United States once stated, remember to “never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

Franz-Stefan Gady is a research fellow focused on future conflict and the future of war at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Follow him on Twitter.