I believe, I believe it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who said ...

Mr. Dwight Justice, Multinational Enterprises Department, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions

Retrenchment is not isolationism it is an adjustment of strategic goals and means. Presidents who followed policies of retrenchment since the end of World War II have included Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and now Obama.

Thatcher certainly did not. The lesson is that in some circumstances, we should prefer leadership by good transactional managers like George H. W. Bush (or Dwight Eisenhower before him), rather than by more flashy and inspirational transformers.

New export markets and private investment opportunities opened up in developing countries. Most Western governments pursued large scale civilian investment programs think of the US interstate highway system built under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950 s.

Indeed, many of my Harvard colleagues would make terrible policymakers, owing to a lack of leadership, managerial, or other interpersonal skills. And many excellent political leaders for example, George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, among US presidents have not been intellectuals.

The IMF s involvement was necessitated only by America s unwillingness to provide support. Furthermore, US President Dwight Eisenhower went so far as to use America s clout within the IMF to force Eden to withdraw British troops from Egypt in exchange for the loan.

If all the economists were laid end to end, George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, they would not reach a conclusion. Frustrated by the conflicting and hedged advice that he was receiving from his advisers, President Dwight Eisenhower is said to have asked once for a one handed economist.

Some call this isolationism, but it might better be called prudence or pragmatism. After all, President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused in 1954 to send US troops to save the French at Dien Bien Phu because he feared that they would be swallowed up by the divisions in Vietnam.

But so far in the third millennium, this skill or simply run of luck has deserted the US. My view is that the problem would fix itself easily if only the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower could stage a comeback (though without Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy).

But, at least for America, perhaps the most important lesson of 9 11 is that US foreign policy should follow the counsel of President Dwight Eisenhower a half century ago Do not get involved in land wars of occupation, and focus on maintaining the strength of the American economy.

Indeed, measured against today s standards, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and Dwight Eisenhower were comparatively authoritarian leaders. The West will have to re adopt such an approach, or risk losing out globally as its ultra right and ultra left political forces consolidate their positions and its middle classes begin to dissolve.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower no intellectual giants, to be sure showed excellent judgment as they established the post war international order that has supported peace in much of the world for decades. Others, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, have had great gifts say, the ability to inspire or a talent for persuasion.

The IAEA traces its lineage to the early dark days of the Cold War. In his December 1953 UN General Assembly Atoms for Peace address, US President Dwight Eisenhower sought to relax atomic weapons competition with the Soviet Union by calling for the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank stocked with superpower fissile material.

Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States in 1959 to open the eyes of the first Soviet leader ever to visit America. The bilateral US China talks in Warsaw in the 1960 s were fruitless until Richard M. Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger opened a different, more direct discussion through the auspices of Pakistan.

During the first Taiwan Straits crisis in 1954, China began shelling the offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, threatening to liberate Taiwan. As the US contemplated a possible nuclear attack on China, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies quietly told US President Dwight Eisenhower, If there is a war over Taiwan, it is your affair and not ours.

For example, in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower s advisers suggested that he should cut taxes in order to pave the way for his vice president, Richard Nixon, to be elected to the presidency. Eisenhower declined, partly because he did not particularly like or trust Nixon, but mostly because he thought it was important to hand over a more nearly balanced budget to his successor.

In this sense, though Obama did not back away from rhetorical expressions of transformational goals regarding such issues as climate change or nuclear weapons, in practice his pragmatism was reminiscent of more incremental presidential leaders like Dwight Eisenhower or George H. W. Bush. Despite his relative inexperience in international affairs, Obama showed a similar skill in reacting to a complex set of foreign policy challenges.

In 2007, the economists Dwight Perkins and Thomas Rawski estimated that, in order for China s economy to maintain a 9 growth rate and a 25 35 investment ratio until 2025, it would need to maintain an annual TFP growth rate of 4.3 4.8 . Given that China s TFP growth has averaged 4 for more than 30 years, and is likely to slow in the coming decade, this scenario is improbable.