Take Some Cues From the Cold War, Mr. President

President Harry S. Truman got Kennan's point, and he defended some of his progressive domestic policies in Cold War terms, noting the need to "inspire the people of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy." Eisenhower was also concerned about the potential foreign policy costs of domestic shortcomings, stressing that "we must not destroy what we are attempting to defend." John F. Kennedy made similar Cold War arguments when he called on Americans to "practice what we preach."

The United States did not always live up to these lofty ideals, but even after the Vietnam War and Watergate it was far stronger and more attractive than the Soviet Union. It simply took the optimism of a Ronald Reagan to reverse the communists' notion that capitalism would die of its own contradictions. Despite early fears to the contrary, the Western democracies survived, and the bankrupt ideology they were fighting collapsed -- just the sort of outcome Bush should be striving for in the ideological struggle we should be waging today.

Even Superpowers Need Friends. In the early Cold War period, faced with an existential nuclear threat and communist aggression on the Korean peninsula, U.S. presidents must have been tempted to rule their military alliances with an iron fist. Instead, leaders such as Truman gave America's allies incentives to work with the United States. They set up institutions, including NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, designed to give other countries a stake in the new order. Truman recognized that "no matter how great our strength, we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."

Eisenhower was even more sensitive to the need to lead by example, drawing on lessons learned in his military career. "A platoon leader," he said in 1954, "doesn't get his platoon to go that way by getting up and saying, 'I am smarter, I am bigger, I am stronger, I am the leader.' He gets men to go with him because they . . . believe in him." Eisenhower also shared Truman's concern about the risk of arrogantly assuming universal appreciation for the United States' good intentions. Thus, whereas Bush simply assumed that all nations would appreciate America's obvious virtue and told allies that they were "either with us or with the terrorists," Eisenhower believed that the United States should work to win allies to its side. "As a free country," he said in 1957, "the only ally we can have is a free ally, one that wants to be with us."

The NATO alliance was hardly free from tensions, as repeated crises demonstrated. But however great the differences among NATO allies, the contrast between their alliance and the Warsaw Pact could not have been starker. By the time the Cold War ended, every member of NATO wanted to remain in that alliance, and most members of the Warsaw Pact wanted to join it as well.

Pick Your Fights. One of the biggest mistakes the United States made during the Cold War -- and one it is repeating today -- was the tendency to see its enemy as one vast, monolithic movement. The result was a costly failure to identify and exploit differences between nationalists and communists -- and among different communists -- around the world.

Kennan was one of the first to see the potential divisions within the communist world and to suggest exploiting them. He was rightly confident that Western European communists, Tito's Yugoslavia, and Mao's China would all want to keep their distance from Moscow.

Instead of exploiting the differences among its enemies, however, Washington -- with rare exceptions such as Richard M. Nixon's opening to Communist China -- often drove them together by treating communism as a single movement, coordinated by Moscow, with a design to take over the world.

Bush does something similar today when he conflates enemies as diverse as the Sunni al-Qaeda network, the Shiite Persian state in Iran, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, and various authoritarian Sunni regimes into a single threat. During the Cold War, by failing to appreciate the degree to which governments in places such as Beijing, Pyongyang and Hanoi had their own distinct interests, U.S. policy helped to turn the notion of a communist monolith into a self-fulfilling prophecy, a mistake it is tragically repeating today.

Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is likely to last a long time. Also like the Cold War, however, it will require us to be patient, to uphold our values, to maintain allies and to differentiate among threats. The precedent of America's triumph in its most recent twilight struggle should give us confidence that if we do all these things, the murderous ideology we face today will end up on the same ash heap of history as communism did. Still, if Bush is going to evoke the Cold War as a model for the battle against terrorism, he had better start getting its real lessons right.

Pgordon@brookings.edu

Philip H. Gordon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World."