- For the past three years, and especially since the September
11, 2001 attacks, a common critique of American foreign policy under President
George Bush has run as follows. The administration's foreign policy is
all brawn and no brain; military force has replaced diplomacy and negotiations
as Washington's main foreign policy instrument.
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- The president is a foreign policy lightweight who knows
little about the world. Therefore, foreign policy is run by Bush's advisers,
especially Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
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- For all intents and purposes, Bush has been the puppet
of darker forces in his administration, above all the neo-conservatives,
who in Senator Joe Biden's words "captured the heart and mind"
of the president.
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- While we share many of these criticisms and very much
fear the chosen direction, we believe that this caricature of Bush's foreign
policy is profoundly mistaken. The problem is not with the people the president
has chosen to have around him, but with the president himself.
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- Bush has launched a revolution in foreign policy - and
it is he, rather than his advisers, who is the true revolutionary. A complete
understanding of this revolution, its impact and likely future requires
a thorough examination of the conventional view to see where it is right
and where it is off-base.
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- It is true that Bush has elevated military power to an
unprecedented degree in foreign policy. But that is not the whole story.
His decision to rely on military power reflects a broader revolution. This,
to be sure, is a revolution in means, not ends.
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- Like most of his predecessors, Bush aims to make America
more secure, prosperous and free by helping to create a world in which
peace, democracy and free enterprise flourish. It is in how to create such
a world, in the way Bush's America engages with it, that this president
bucks the norm.
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- Bush's revolution departs from an earlier one launched
by President Woodrow Wilson nearly a century ago. Wilson argued that the
best way to deal with a dangerous world was for America to engage proactively
abroad. He rejected the admonition of John Quincy Adams, the only other
son of a president to have served in the White House, who warned against
going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy."
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- Instead, Wilson believed America's security demanded
that the United States do just that. And so does Bush, who has made the
need to go on the offensive - to destroy the terrorists and tyrants before
they destroy us - his central foreign policy platform.
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- Yet, even as he has embraced the activist pillar of Wilson's
revolution, Bush has rejected the second, more important pillar, which
is that the US should engage abroad in partnership with friends and allies,
through international institutions, and on the basis of international law.
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- Bush has rejected these partnerships, institutions and
the rule of law as critical means for securing American interests. The
essence of the revolution is that an America unbound is a more secure America
- that the best way to maximise America's security is to minimise constraints
on Washington's freedom of action.
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- This has meant that Bush has abandoned a 60-year consensus
on how the US should engage abroad - a consensus that encompassed Democratic
and Republican presidents alike; not just Harry Truman, John Kennedy and
Bill Clinton, but also Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, of course, Bush's
own father.
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- Divided The World
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- Instead of relying on international institutions, Bush
has divided the world into those who are with America and those who are
against it. Instead of embracing alliances, he has trumpeted the creation
of coalitions of the willing, formed for particular purposes and disbanded
once the mission has been accomplished.
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- Instead of engaging in diplomacy and negotiations with
America's enemies, he has pushed for regime change. Instead of addressing
threats with the time-tested strategies of deterrence and containment,
he has focused on pre-emption. This foreign policy represents a breathtaking,
indeed radical departure.
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- Where does this foreign policy revolution originate from
- who is its chief architect? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is George
Bush. It turns out that the president is the true revolutionary - that
he is more the puppeteer than the puppet he is often portrayed as. This
conclusion is based on two arguments.
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- First, Bush has very strong convictions about how the
US should engage the world; he has a clear, coherent worldview. Secondly,
he has approached the presidency much like a corporation, where he is a
chief executive officer who is very much in charge.
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- Although Bush might not be able to articulate his worldview
in a way that an international relations specialist would recognise, there
is little doubt that he came to office with a particular perception of
how the world operates. Bush believes that this is a dangerous world -
before September 11 it was madmen and missiles that posed the threat, now
it is dangerous because of terrorists and tyrants.
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- In this dangerous world, it is states, not the forces
of globalisation, that determine what happens in international politics.
Power - especially military power - matters most, and those with the most
power matter mostest, as Bush might put it. To Bush, friends, allies and
international institutions are at best irrelevant to the pursuit of America's
goals; at worst they are constraints on its ability to achieve them.
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- Finally, America not only is a uniquely just global power,
but others know it is so. Those who oppose the US do so not because they
might believe America does not have their interests at heart, but because
they must wish America ill.
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- Where did Bush get this worldview? Many doubt it is his
own. Bush, clearly, is not a well-read person, a deep student of international
politics and foreign culture, or really curious about the ways of the world.
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- How, many ask, can a man who knows so little, who refuses
even to read the newspapers, who travels in a security bubble and rarely
takes time to learn about other places on foreign visits, be so certain
about the world? Surely, it is only because he has followed the dictates
of others - of Cheney, Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, and the "neo-cons"?
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- The doubters mistake knowledge for beliefs. It is the
intellectual's conceit to think beliefs must be based on knowledge, that
only once you have studied the works of the great theorists is it possible
to have a coherent worldview. Real life is otherwise. We all have a worldview,
forged through personal experience, and most of us will absorb new facts
within that prevailing view rather than change our views because of new
facts. Bush is no different.
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- The president saw the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon as confirmation of his view that this was a dangerous
world. He believed that the terrorists who launched the strikes could not
have been as effective without the support of states.
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- He looked to America's power, especially its military
might, as the best way to respond to that threat - toppling the regimes
he believed supported the terrorists. He accepted the support of international
institutions, including the invocation of the mutual defence clause of
the Nato treaty and of the UN Security Council, but refused to subordinate
American actions in any way to the wishes of alliance partners or institutions.
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- Above all, the attacks and his swift, determined response
strengthened his conviction that his view of the world and the way in which
America should operate within it was exactly on the mark.
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- How do we know that it is Bush's beliefs that dominate
America's foreign policy? Because Bush has fashioned a chief executive
presidency in which he is very much in charge. He sought the best and the
brightest to lead the divisions of his corporation.
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- He chose Cheney as his vice-president not for the political
advantage that Wyoming's three electoral votes would bring, but because
he could help Bush govern. He appointed Rumsfeld and Secretary of State
Colin Powell because they were seasoned veterans. None of them were, as
Bush put it, "shrinking violets" - and neither was Rice.
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- There is a natural tendency to believe that because Bush's
advisers were strong and smart and his knowledge of world affairs limited,
to say the least, the advisers must be in control. This is the conventional
wisdom in Washington - perhaps because there are a lot more advisers and
wannabe advisers in Washington who would like this to be so. The reality
with this president is quite different.
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- Bush acknowledged that he would necessarily rely on his
team to give him the best advice and to implement the decisions he made,
as any good chief executive would. But he would make the decisions.
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- "I'll be getting some of the best counsel possible,"
Bush said of his aides. "There's going to be disagreements. I hope
there is disagreement, because I know that disagreement will be based upon
solid thought. And what you need to know is that if there is disagreement,
I'll be prepared to make the decision necessary for the good of the country."
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- Made No Secret
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- From the day he became president, Bush made no secret
about who was in charge. In early 2001, Rumsfeld announced that he would
abandon the Clinton defence budget in favour of a larger one of his own,
only to be contradicted by the White House which announced the defence
budget request for that year would stay at the Clinton level.
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- A month later, Bush publicly embarrassed Powell, who
one day argued that the administration would continue to negotiate with
North Korea and the next was forced to say that, in fact, Bush had no interest
in talks with someone he could not trust. "I got a little far forward
on my skis," Powell later explained.
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- Bush even went against Cheney, first rebuffing the vice-president's
attempts to take control of inter-agency policy-making from Rice and later
ignoring Cheney's warnings that restarting inspections in Iraq would put
Washington in a trap of continued, fruitless investigation without the
option of going to war. Bush had more confidence in his ability to avoid
this trap - and he did.
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- Bush is a decisive leader, very much in charge of his
own administration. He has led his country in a clear direction - one that
he has set himself. Unfortunately, in Iraq Bush's revolution appears to
be reaching its limits; it may even be hitting a brick wall.
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- Contrary to expectations, the success in toppling Saddam
Hussain did not lead to an easy peace. An insurgency followed the quick
battlefield victory, and success in this war remains elusive. The internal
fissures within Iraq are preventing the formation of a governing authority
capable of holding the country together, keeping it stable, and putting
it on a road to representative government.
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- As a result, few other countries have been willing to
join America in Iraq. Some 90 per cent of the troops, the casualties, the
costs are American. Sometimes, an America unbound turns out to be an America
that is very much on its own.
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- When you are heading for a brick wall you have three
basic options. You can continue going headlong into it - which for Bush
would mean no re-election. You can turn left and go back to the pre-revolutionary
era of pragmatic internationalism, in which America engaged abroad together
with others and in co-operation with international institutions.
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- This is the policy favoured by Bush's predecessors -
and his secretary of state. Or you can turn right, narrow your focus and
reduce America's involvement in the world to those few areas that are absolutely
vital to maintain America's freedom of action.
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- Bush is far too smart to run into a brick wall - and
far too committed to bettering his father's political record. So will he
turn left and try do more with others or turn right and do less alone?
Everything we know about the president suggests that while his rhetoric
may soften, his actions will be consistent with a rightward lurch.
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- The "war" on terror and Iraq have already become
the single foreign policy preoccupation of this president - in the future
they are likely to be his sole preoccupation. That may be a disaster for
America and the world, but it is fully consistent with the course George
Bush has been on from the beginning.
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- Ivo H. Daalder, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution,
and James M Lindsay, Vice-President and Director of Studies at the Council
on Foreign Relations, are co-authors of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution
in Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2003), which was launched
at a recent meeting at Chatham House.
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- http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/opinion.asp?ArticleID=106703
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