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04.09.07
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An Uninispiring Legacy
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Comment by Vladimir Frolov
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By Focusing on the Middle East, Bush Lost an Opportunity in Russia
Both Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush have entered that interesting phase in their presidencies when they have to think about their historic legacies as they prepare to exit the political scene.
Bush is at a distinct disadvantage in the international legacy race with Putin. He appears to be presiding over a failed presidency; both his domestic and international agendas are in ruins, his policies are deeply unpopular at home and abroad and he is even personally despised by many people in the United States and in the world at large.
Bush’s presidency was not preordained to turn out this way. He had a chance to become a great and popular international leader. He came to the world scene in 2001 as an unsophisticated novice, albeit surrounded by an impressive coterie of experienced international advisors, most of whom he inherited from his father’s administration in the early 1990s. He spent the better half of the first year in the White House preaching “humility in international conduct” and researching the mysterious soul of a relatively unknown Russian leader.
September 11, 2001 and its aftermath made Bush, for a while, the unquestioned world leader.
A decisive victory in Afghanistan over the oppressive Taliban regime and a vigorous war on terror gave Bush the moral authority to shape an international order that would advance his agenda. He also had an opportunity to make America’s unrivaled military power a force for good.
The swelling wave of sympathy and goodwill towards the United States after the horrific terrorist attacks in New York and Washington created an unprecedented opportunity for Bush to lead the world by persuasion and leadership. Bush, however, wasted this unique opportunity that history had thrown into his hands. The Bush team misread it for a blank check to impose the will of the United States.
Bush’s foreign policy goals were mostly well intentioned, but na?ve and irresponsible.
It was the right thing to do to oppose Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and his international adventurism. It was another thing altogether to invade Iraq without an understanding of the long term consequences of this action. It was the right thing to squeeze North Korea’s Kim Jong Il to make him face the likelihood of his regime’s collapse, but it was irresponsible to refuse to engage the North Koreans in direct talks over their nuclear program until they detonated a nuclear device.
Iraq is often portrayed as a foreign policy disaster that, like Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, has determined Bush’s place in history. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 became a watershed that separated Bush’s period of success from that of decline and failure. The true cause of Bush’s foreign policy problems could be described by just one word – arrogance.
Nowhere else is this more evident than in his pursuit of democracy promotion during his second term. Bush decided to make democracy promotion the central foreign policy issue of his second presidency, making a passionate inaugural address in which he pledged to spread democracy around the world. His initial goal was even more ambitious and idealistic: “ending tyranny in our lifetime.”
But, as Peter Baker of the Washington Post wrote in a recent essay, “the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it, including his own vice president. The Iraq war has distracted Bush and, in some quarters, discredited his aspirations. … Bush at times has compromised the idealism of that speech in the muddy reality of guarding other U.S. interests.”
With about 16 months left in his faltering presidency, Bush is grappling with the challenge of salvaging what remains of his foreign policy agenda. A friend close to Bush calls it “a last desperate run at a foreign policy legacy.”
In the view of this knowledgeable observer, Bush’s rising rhetoric about Iran points to a “U.S. push for a showdown, an attempt to pressure Iran into negotiations on terms favorable to the U.S. or, if that fails, military strikes in Iran.”
In Iraq, Bush is still hoping “to figure out a sustainable smaller U.S. presence” while abandoning hopes for a viable Iraq central government, and looking for ways to cut deals with sectarian leaders to reduce violence. It is clear that Iraqi democracy as a goal, the central objective at the time of the invasion and the one crucial for the democratic transformation of a larger Middle East, has long been abandoned.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, is also desperately looking for ways to salvage what remains of her own legacy, conscious that Iraq will forever be viewed as a stain on her reputation. For example, Stanford University has doubts as to whether to welcome Rice back as a provost. “Condi's role now,” says my friend in Washington, “is to get something on the Middle East peace front.” A thankless task to be sure.
In his preoccupation with Iraq and Iran, Bush is missing opportunities to secure his foreign policy legacy by a breakthrough in relations with Russia.
President Putin came to Kennebunkport, Maine prepared for a long-ranging discussion on Russian and U.S. responsibilities in forging new security structures for the world.
It was in this context that Putin made his surprise proposal on sharing data from the Russian ABM radar in Azerbaijan. He was hoping to be able to take it further, if Bush were to reciprocate with readiness to discuss the future of the U.S. ABM deployments in Eastern Europe.
But Bush shortsightedly took the proposal as an opening through which to ram through the U.S. unilateral agenda on ABM sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin quickly saw that his conciliatory, but ambitious, offer would not be reciprocated and quickly scuttled it into an incomprehensible proposal.
Bush has allowed his successful Russia policy to be hijacked by anti-Russian ideologues in his own administration – Vice President Cheney and his aides and Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried.
The departure of Tom Graham, former National Security Council Senior Director for Russia, earlier this year signaled Bush’s lack of interest in securing Russia as part of his foreign policy legacy. As Graham writes in his excellent piece in Russia in Global Affairs magazine, the growing U.S. criticism of Russia reflects a “decreasing confidence in Washington in the effectiveness of its own policies.”
It is becoming increasingly clear that Bush’s foreign policy legacy will include a global crisis of confidence in U.S. power as a force for good in the world.
This is certainly not what Bush hoped he would be remembered for. |
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