After years of proclaiming that it understood international politics
better than its predecessors, the Bush
administration
is trying to undo
the damage its first seven years have wrought— trying, in effect, to
take US foreign policy back to where it was before
President Bush was
sworn in.But the world is a very different place today, and much less
advantageous to the United States. Square 1,
administration officials
are finding, is no longer really square 1.In 2001, the administration
declared a revolution in the practice and substance of US foreign
policy. It ridiculed liberal internationalist ideals of multilateral
cooperation. It opposed using US military power dressed up as
“nation-building.” It wrote off global warming as Al Gore’s obsession,
and it said it wouldn’t get bogged down, as its predecessors had, in
Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.Then after 9/11, the administration
went further, developing a radical new doctrine for the pre-emptive use
of military force. The war on terrorism became its defining
issue.Today, the world looks very different. And in trying to reverse
the damage done during its first seven years —including an
overstretched military and a loss of global prestige and influence —the
administration, ironically, has quietly adopted many of the policies it
once scorned.At the end of his term, President Clinton was successfully
working to preserve the benefits and correct the flaws in the 1994
Agreed Framework that aimed to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons
programme. After taking office in 2001, the Bush administration wrote
off this progress and instead placed North Korea into the “axis of
evil.” It then halfheartedly went along with the six-party talks,
initiated in 2003 and hosted by China, on the security issues raised by
North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. Meanwhile, North Korea built
more warheads, declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and conducted
its first nuclear test in October 2006.With the problem worsening, the
administration finally loosened the negotiating strictures, and a major
agreement with North Korea was reached in early 2007. In the Middle
East, the Bush administration backed off the traditional US role of
peace broker between Arabs and Israelis. Then late last year, at the
peace conference in Annapolis, Md., the United States revived its role
as Mideast peace broker. Last week, Bush flew to the region and met
with the principals to get the process off the ground. But the
obstacles to a settlement seem greater now than when Bush took office.
While the situation in Iraq is completely different from what it was in
2000—Saddam is gone, there are hundreds of thousands of US troops in
the country and there is a democratically elected government—success in
Iraq in 2008 is defined, for all intents and purposes, as containment:
no weapons of mass destruction, no terrorist havens and no spillover of
internal violence into other countries. But the next president will not
be starting from an international position similar to the one Bush
inherited no matter how successful the administration is in undoing the
damage of its failed policies. No one should feel vindicated by
the Bush administration’s reversals, because defining the future of US
foreign policy in terms of the past would be as big a mistake for the
next president as it was for Bush.When you are a great power, a lost
decade does not simply leave you back where you started. It leaves you
far behind.