At Prospect Magazine (UK), Edward Luttwak says Bush is “a Truman for our times.”  Which is to say, he’s being generally derided at this point in history and will be celebrated only much later.  The comparison is worth noting, although who can tell what history will think of him?

The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong-Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth.

In only eight years, perceptions of Bill Clinton have changed tremendously.  Back then, despite what we seemed to know about his personal behavior, the world saw him as the perennial Comeback Kid that you just couldn’t keep down.  Now, Vanity Fair is calling him “The Comeback Id.”  The comparison of Bush with Truman is apt: Truman’s Korean War was seen as a failure of sorts, and Asia was seen as more a threat than ever.  And, Truman was hated abroad.  And now, history loves Truman.  “It is all a question of time perspectives: the Korean war is half forgotten, while everyone now knows that Truman’s strategy of containment was successful and finally ended with the almost peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire.”

For Bush to be recognised as a great president in the Truman mould, the Iraq war too must become half forgotten [...] Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was precisely that-a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy.

Compare and contrast always was one of my favorite kind of essays.