Andrew Bacevich on BillMoyers.com shows how decisions that happen on a President’s watch, even an almost universally respected and even revered one like Eisenhower, can have consequences decades later.

As for Eisenhower, although there is much in his presidency to admire, his errors of omission and commission were legion. During his two terms, from Guatemala to Iran, the CIA overthrew governments, plotted assassinations and embraced unsavory right-wing dictators — in effect, planting a series of IEDs destined eventually to blow up in the face of Ike’s various successors. Meanwhile, binging on nuclear weapons, the Pentagon accumulated an arsenal far beyond what even Eisenhower as commander-in-chief considered prudent or necessary.

In addition, during his tenure in office, the military-industrial complex became a rapacious juggernaut, an entity unto itself as Ike himself belatedly acknowledged. By no means least of all, Eisenhower fecklessly committed the United States to an ill-fated project of nation building in a country that just about no American had heard of at the time: South Vietnam. Ike did give the nation eight years of relative peace and prosperity, but at a high price — most of the bills coming due long after he left office.

This caught my eye during a week when events during the Iranian Revolution (1979) are influencing the 2016 election. And the revolution was in turn caused CIA participation in destabilization of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. And the destabilization of Iran had begun far earlier under the British, who openly sought to control the natural resources of the region.

Bill Clinton’s decisions in the 1990s on trade, drugs, and financial deregulation are also being discussed in this election. I think we are already suspecting that George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and even Afghanistan in the early 2000s will go down as our country’s greatest blunders of modern times. I wonder how some of Obama’s decisions on intervention in the Middle East, relations with Russia and China, and financial regulation (or lack thereof) will turn out in the long run.