Abe Greenwald and Ralph Peters, among others, have compared President Obama’s cautiousness on Iran with President Eisenhower’s moves when the Soviets brutally put down a Hungarian rebellion in 1956.

Greenwald: “There’s something tragically familiar in this. In the early 1950s President Eisenhower encouraged Hungarians to fight back against their Soviet oppressors. As Ralph Peters puts it in today’s New York Post, “When they did, we watched from the sidelines as Russian tanks drove over them.”’

Do Greenwald and Peters mean that President Eisenhower and the U.S. should have gone to war with the Soviet Union over the revolt in Hungary? Eisenhower would have made war on a vulnerable nuclear power, which probably would have instigated a nuclear war, killing probably billions in the process. That‘s what they think Eisenhower should have done?

Or is the real lesson of 1956 that the U.S. should not be encouraging foreigners to overthrow their governments unless we’re prepared to intervene with force on their behalf? That words matter, and grandstanding by U.S. politicians has serious moral as well as strategic costs? There are a number of Hungarians who died in 1956 indirectly because the U.S. wrote a check it never intended to cash. Before Peters and Greenwald rush to encourage Obama to get out his own check-writing pen, they might want to consider that.