- On The Shambles That Is The Bush Foreign Policy
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- If the administration's foreign-policy apparat (minus
the increasingly isolated Colin Powell) were placed under one roof -- Rice,
Rumsfeld, and Reich; Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush -- what watchword
would be inscribed over the door? No, not "Abandon all hope, ye who
enter." There are any number of supplicants who should not abandon
hope -- Latin American putschsters, China's Leninist social Darwinists,
the Colombian paramilitary, Ariel Sharon, even al-Qaeda terrorists scrambling
over mountaintops with no U.S soldiers around to impede them. If not Dante,
then, the inscription could be provided by another immortal. Casey Stengel,
whose term in purgatory managing the '62 Mets prompted the deathless line
that fits the Bush gang to a tee, said, "Can't anybody here play this
game?"
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- Apparently not. In record time, the Bush administration's
foreign policy has become a cosmic shambles -- its interventions increasingly
ineffectual and counterproductive; its refusals to intervene only making
bad situations worse; its unilateralism undone by the impossibility, even
for the world's superpower, of going it alone; its Manichaeism unsustainable
in the face of complex, not to mention simple, realities; and its president's
pronouncements good for the life span of a gnat.
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- Herewith, just a few instances in which our government
has charged uphill and back down again:
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- The Middle East: Initially this was the one problem area
on which all groups within the administration concurred: The United States
should stay out of the growing Israeli-Palestinian conflict; there was
nothing it could do. A more stunningly self-fulfilling prophecy is hard
to recall. In recent weeks, the Mideast has become the one problem area
in which administration disagreements produce self-negating positions on
an hourly basis. The very day the United States supports a United Nations
resolution demanding Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank, the president
defends Israel's "right of self defense." As Powell trundles
from Sharon to Yasir Arafat to promote de-escalation, Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld back Sharon's offensive and the poor president, beset by conflicting
counsel, is left spinning like a top. Powell's trip enters the history
books as the U.S. diplomatic mission most completely undermined by its
own government. The manifest need for the United States to impose itself
(and some allied forces) between Israel and Palestine is lost in the shuffle.
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- Afghanistan: After campaigning for more than a year as
the Anti-Clinton, George W. Bush has been compelled to embrace two fundamental
Clintonian policies. First -- for the better -- he has reluctantly concluded
that nation building is the responsibility of a great power after all,
particularly because, in its absence, Afghanistan might quickly revert
to a state of semi-anarchy in which terrorists could resume their pre September
11 activities. Second -- for worse -- after all the rhetorical bravado
that the Bush presidency would never pull a punch in a military action,
the administration decided to fight the same kind of high-tech, no-ground-troops,
low-casualty war that Clinton waged, successfully if belatedly, in the
Kosovo war. What ultimately worked in that case, however, was bound to
fizzle in a war where success was measured by our capture of Osama bin
Laden, dead or alive. With most U.S. intelligence analysts agreeing that
bin Laden slipped through our surrogates' lines at Tora Bora (our surrogates
being the local chapter of Rent-A-Warrior) while U.S. soldiers were kept
far from harm, Bush's mighty vow -- not just to get bin Laden but to wage
the appropriate war -- looks mighty hollow.
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- Latin America: From the moment that Bush gave the Latin
American desk at the State Department to Otto Reich, one of the architects
of the Iran-contra idiocy, the Venezuelan coup may have been a fait accompli
(though clearly less accompli than its architects had thought). Whatever
winks, nods, and secret handshakes may have preceded the coup, it's plain
that the administration did nothing to stop it. (And it was hardly a secret:
A number of hours before it began, The Financial Times ran a front-page
story headlined, "Chavez on the Brink as Military Looks Set to Act.").
Worse, the White House welcomed the coup with all speed and no apparent
deliberation. Latin American presidents, meeting in Costa Rica, jointly
condemned the coup just as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer hailed it.
In a mind-boggling display of worst-case unilateralism, the administration
had neglected to consult any of them before issuing its praise. But this
was of a piece with such kindred hemispheric confidence-building measures
as our speeding the collapse of the Argentine economy and failing to deliver
on the immigration reform so crucial to Mexico. For good measure, the administration
remains bent on further militarizing the drug war in Colombia, although
(or because) much of that aid ends up diverted to the army and its paramilitary
adjuncts for their war on guerrillas, union activists, and peasants in
areas of uncertain loyalties.
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- How to account for such thoroughgoing disarray? First,
it's clear that Bush's foreign policy is shaped chiefly by ideologues whose
perspectives both reinforce each other's and inform the president's keep-it-simple
weltanschauung. Powell's is increasingly a dissenting voice, and, with
few allies, all he has to bolster his case are the facts on the ground.
In this White House, that's usually not enough.
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- The assumptions behind the various tendencies that make
up Bush's foreign policy are many, but not all that varied. Contemporary
conservatives of virtually every stripe tend to see this jumbled world
as starkly divided into two opposing camps, much as their conservative
forebears had subsumed all conflicts under the clash of East and West.
From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, conservatives tried to squeeze all
the world's disorders into this template, which periodically led them (their
nation in tow) to charge into one cul-de-sac after another -- to the greater
good of very few. But they weren't wrong about the existence of those two
camps, or that one was fundamentally evil. (And, as they never acknowledged,
the other occasionally and ambiguously so.)
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- Bush has tried to sustain those clear demarcations that
informed (or misinformed ) his father's and grandfather's generations.
Confronting al-Qaeda after 9-11, that was easy, and he justly had his nation's
(and much of the world's) support. But dividing up the world between the
friends of terror and the friends of man has proved trickier. There are
friends of terror in the oil bidness; are they friend or foe? There are
friends of freedom and democracy in Western Europe, welfare-loving cosmopolitans
who increasingly hate our guts; what are they?
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- Among those sustaining and shaping Bush's perspective
are Cold War nostalgists such as Reich, whom Bush has stashed away throughout
the State and Defense departments. There are Hobbesian tough guys (a strain
John B. Judis identified in his column "The Real Foreign-Policy Debate,"
TAP , May 6, 2002) such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who put their
trust not in the shared values or common interests of nations, but solely
in our own armed might -- the geopolitical counterparts of the survivalist
who's stored his food and water and means to defend it with his gun. (The
administration's contempt for treaties, international standards, and compacts
is of a piece with the survivalist's contempt for the sheriff and the judge.)
There are Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, both nostalgists and survivalists.
No Hans Morganthau realists, no Woodrow Wilson idealists need apply in
this administration; they are either too entangled in the world as it is
or too committed to its betterment.
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- Finally, not enough attention has been paid to the foreign
policy milieu of Bush himself -- the specific political, cultural, and
generational cohorts he both personifies and leads. In fact the dominant
wing of the Republican Party -- the Southern and more particularly Texas
wing -- has its own distinct approach to the wider world, if not to modernity
itself. Bush shares that approach with fellow Texans Dick Armey -- the
House majority leader, who's boasted of never having traveled to Europe
-- and House Whip Tom DeLay, who's lately taken to voicing his misgivings
about the Enlightenment. The president, we all know, is not simply incurious
about the world but clearly reluctant to see it: He took all of one European
trip in the 48 years before he became governor. What he did know of the
world was that its values were far (and getting farther) from the cultural
traditionalism and laissez-faire capitalism he knew and liked. Sure, his
father and his father's guys -- James Baker above all -- were comfortable
in that wider world. Early on, though, he must have grasped that that kind
of cosmopolitanism (however limited) was beyond him. So he went the other
way and found a new right-wing generation happy to accompany him. Bush,
Armey, DeLay, Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert -- they're provincials and proud
of it. They revel in a parochialism that would have made even Reagan (who,
after all, came from Hollywood) a bit uneasy. When the world is not to
their liking, they despise and dismiss it.
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- Bush not only revives the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
American tradition of shunning foreign entitlements, then; he takes it
to a new level. At the heart of the administration's foreign policy is
something both old and disquietingly new: simple xenophobia.
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- For the world's only superpower, this is passing strange,
not to mention completely dysfunctional. The administration's willful insularity
subverts many of America's forays into strange (and familiar) lands. Worse,
at a time when the need for concerted global action -- to address economic
inequality, environmental degradation, and climate change, to list only
the most basic crises -- could not be clearer, America's abdication has
become the primary obstacle to doing the planet's business. Thanks to the
president's unilateralism uber-alles-approach, the Kyoto Treaty and the
International Criminal Court have been crippled at birth.
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- The Bush administration's reluctant interventions and
hasty withdrawals, its start-and-stop initiatives, and its shock at complexity
are all of a piece with its fundamental xenophobia. A more sustainable
global order is stillborn, as the superpower sulks in its tent.
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- Harold Meyerson
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- Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc.
Preferred Citation: Harold Meyerson, "Axis of Incompetence,"
The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 9, May 20, 2002. This article may not
be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without
prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions
to permissions@prospect.org.
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