02-04-2006

Foreign Policy - After the Revolution

James Kitfield (Email this author)
© National Journal Group, Inc.


It was the photo op worth a thousand words, capturing perfectly the duality at the center of the Bush administration's foreign policy in the second term. A smiling President Bush sat at the Roosevelt Room conference table on January 5, flanked by his senior foreign-policy and national security aides and surrounded by former secretaries of State and Defense -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- going back to the Kennedy administration. Bush was symbolically reaching back not only through time but, perhaps more surprisingly, across the political aisle for counsel.


Insiders confirm that Bush engaged in a spirited give-and-take on his Iraq policy at the briefing -- detailing his "strategy for victory" while listening to criticism and conceding some missteps on Iraq. In December, the president had previewed those admissions in an unprecedented blitz of six major speeches on Iraq in a two-week period. Bush was on display frequently in early January, too, as if the White House were pointedly trying to debunk the "Bush in a Bubble" image depicted on a recent Newsweek cover, whose accompanying story described an increasingly unpopular and prickly president hypersensitive to criticism and insulated from the real world by a cadre of senior advisers and yes-women.


"Frankly, a number of us welcomed the invitation to the White House briefing [on January 5], even though we understood that the price of admission was going to be a photo op," said William Cohen, a Republican and a former Defense secretary in the Clinton administration. "Personally, I feel that kind of reaching out to former officials and Congress is long overdue because, as I learned during the Kosovo war, just a little bipartisan support can help sustain you in the tough times. But none of us anticipated that our input was going to fundamentally alter the shape of President Bush's foreign policy."


So, is the Bush administration's new campaign of bipartisan outreach at home and multilateral engagement overseas genuine, or is it just a stylistic flourish designed to mask the hard edges of a foreign policy that in Bush's first term bruised feelings on Capitol Hill, broke diplomatic china around the world, and left the United States bearing the heaviest burden of Iraq's reconstruction? Crop the January 5 photo closer, and that unsettling question comes into even sharper relief.


There, still sitting at Bush's immediate right, were Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the uber-hard-liners whom critics charge with pushing the nation into an ill-conceived war with Iraq. Except that Cheney has seen his approval ratings sink to just 30 percent in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, hardly a level befitting the "confidence builder" he played to an inexperienced president in the first term. Meanwhile, the acerbic Rumsfeld has been on his best behavior of late, quietly focusing on military "transformation," staying on message during trips abroad, and -- unlike in the first term -- playing the role of a diplomatic team player.


To Bush's left that day were Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the administration's supposed moderates. After accepting the position of secretary of State in the first term with more stature than any of his predecessors since George Marshall, Powell left diminished after four years of nearly constant battles with what a top aide has recently been calling the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal." Yet there Powell was at Bush's side once again, a loyal soldier but the odd man out at the revolution.


For her part, Rice has emerged in the past year as the unabashed star of the Bush Cabinet after taking heavy criticism for her passive "gatekeeper" role as national security adviser in the first term. She is now widely seen as a globe-trotting goodwill ambassador who is charming U.S. allies back into the fold and standing up in internal battles for her somewhat counter-revolutionary inclinations toward diplomacy and multilateral engagement.


And that is how the January 5 meeting and photo op captured the paradox at the heart of the Bush administration's second-term foreign policy. The names remain largely the same, but everything else has changed. A tidal wave of anti-Americanism abroad, sagging presidential poll numbers at home, and a protracted and bloody occupation in Iraq have all conspired to put the brakes on the first-term revolution in foreign affairs. That hard reality is reflected in the Bush administration's belated outreach across the aisle and uncharacteristic displays of humility, and in its newfound flexibility in negotiations with allies and adversaries alike.


But what, if anything, has changed in the worldview that informs those tactical adjustments? How do you parse a post-revolutionary period in U.S. foreign affairs, when the same key actors, including most particularly George W. Bush himself, still occupy center stage?


A Revolution Unleashed
Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson was present at the post-9/11 foreign-policy revolution, and he has the searing memories to prove it. As the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Powell, he worked for a boss who stood most comfortably in the "realist" camp of the Republican Party. This was a camp epitomized by George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, two men who played important roles in Powell's meteoric career.


Together, these men stood for the idea that countries act on the world stage mainly out of national interest rather than from any moral imperative. They also believed that it was in the United States' interest to be seen as a benevolent power that led through the architecture of multilateral organizations, alliances, and treaties that America had painstakingly constructed after World War II. After all, these foundations helped the United States to become an unchallenged superpower in the second half of the 20th century. Given the obvious advantages that accrued to the United States under that system, theirs was a largely status quo worldview that prized stability, and Colin Powell brought to that perspective the innate caution of the Vietnam veteran and reluctant warrior.


Especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however, Powell found himself badly out of step with the more radical approach championed by Cheney and Rumsfeld and their most senior aides. Together they stood for the premise that in a time of great peril, the United States must unshackle itself from the bonds of multilateral alliances and treaties, and use that freedom of action and predominant U.S. military power to decisively shatter the axis of terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction. Particularly among prominent neoconservatives in George W. Bush's inner circle, that revolutionary approach was also informed by a deep Wilsonian idealism that imbues America with a moral responsibility to advance the cause of freedom and democracy worldwide. From the Cheney-Rumsfeld camp flowed a doctrine of pre-emption, a preference for ad hoc coalitions of lesser powers as cover for unilateral U.S. action, and a focus on coercion and "regime change" in tyrannical states.


"As two former secretaries of Defense, Cheney and Rumsfeld formed an alliance to put our military might at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, and their secret cabal made decisions in such a cloistered way that it isolated both the government bureaucracy and President Bush himself, who I don't believe was aware of important details of his own foreign policy," said Wilkerson, speaking recently at Johns Hopkins University. "Was the Cheney-Rumsfeld point of view at odds with Secretary Powell's on almost every issue that arose? Yes. Did that leave Powell conducting damage control with our allies so often that he rarely had time to proactively pursue what he perceived as President Bush's foreign policy? Yes. Sometimes the inherent ambiguity of Bush's own position was also at fault, because no one could figure out exactly where he stood."


Of course, the predilections at the core of the post-9/11 Bush revolution culminated in the Iraq war. But several top aides who stoked the ideological fires in the first term have exited the inner circle, most notably Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith (Rumsfeld's No. 2 and 3 at the Pentagon, respectively); Richard Perle, a former influential member of the Defense Science Board; and their close confidant I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff.


With those neocons gone, the State Department now firmly under Rice's control, and her approval ratings topping 50 percent -- higher than the president's -- Rice shows increasing signs of becoming the second term's Colin Powell, only this time with real clout and the president's trust.


"Do I find it 'ironic' that the Bush administration is now pursuing foreign-policy ideas most associated with Colin Powell, the one person who is no longer in the Cabinet? Yeah, that's one word for it," said Richard Haas, who was undersecretary of State for policy in Bush's first term. Haas, however, credits the shift in the administration's foreign-policy approach to diminished alternatives, rather than to changed outlooks among the key principals. The administration reached far in pursuing a war of choice with Iraq, Haas argues, and only history can judge whether it overreached.


"But the inescapable short-term result has been that the U.S. faces greatly narrowed choices elsewhere," said Haas, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "We've gone from a having a military largely at peace to one that is now heavily at war. We've gone from budget surpluses to a massive budget deficit. We've gone from America being quite popular abroad to facing a wave of anti-Americanism around the world. Partly as a result of those changed circumstances, our threats of regime change have failed to deter North Korea or Iran, both of which are four to five years further along in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. So the strategic rationale for changing our approach was overwhelming."


Condi's New Team
After making her debut trip to Europe as secretary of State in February 2005, Condoleezza Rice met in the Oval Office with Bush and his inner circle of advisers, including Cheney, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and Chief of Staff Andy Card. Though Rice had traveled to Europe primarily to talk about Iraq, her trip had become dominated by a barrage of criticism that the Bush administration was failing to support European allies in their efforts to get Iran to halt its nuclear program. In the negotiations, the E.U.-3 (France, Germany, and Great Britain), as they were calling themselves, were also hoping to stave off another alliance-splitting conflict between the United States and a charter member of the "axis of evil."


"When I went to Europe that first time as secretary, I was stunned that almost all the questions were about Iran, and that somehow the Europeans felt like they had gotten wedged between Iran and the United States," Rice told National Journal. (See interview in this issue, p. 42.) "There was a sense that if the United States would just support the negotiations, then the Iranians would come around. And I remember coming back and talking to the president and vice president in the Oval Office and saying, 'How did we get into this position where it's somehow America's fault?' "


The short answer, of course, is John Bolton. In the first term, the famously unyielding Bolton, then the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, was openly disdainful of the European-led negotiations and adamantly opposed to offering concessions to either Iran or North Korea in talks on their nuclear programs. Bolton is widely known to hew closely to the worldview of his benefactor, Dick Cheney, who succinctly summarized his own reason for interceding to scuttle talks with North Korea in the first term. "We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it," Cheney said, according to The Washington Post.


Bolton, along with other such ideologues from the first term, such as Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, is now noticeably absent from Foggy Bottom. Many observers interpreted Bolton's appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as an internal victory for Cheney over the more moderate Rice. But the bruising and ultimately unsuccessful Senate confirmation battle the administration had to wage on Bolton's behalf was an unwelcome distraction early in the second term and a reminder of the high price in political capital that the administration would have to to pay for maintaining the ideological purity of the revolution. (Bolton was eventually given a recess appointment that lasts only until this fall.)


With Bolton out of Washington and most ideologues gone from Foggy Bottom, Rice assembled an experienced team composed largely of National Security Council experts, former ambassadors, and career Foreign Service officers. The team is headed by Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick, the former U.S. trade representative, and Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign Service officer and former NATO ambassador to whom Rice has given a globe-spanning portfolio that stretches from Europe and the Indian subcontinent to Asia. Rice's counselor and chief troubleshooter is Philip Zelikow, who served on the Bush 41 National Security Council and subsequently co-authored, with Rice, a book on German reunification.


The preference for expertise over ideology in the Rice State Department is especially pronounced in the important regional bureaus manned by assistant secretaries; Rice has stocked these posts entirely with experienced hands from the diplomatic corps. On January 18, she announced that she was also shifting hundreds of diplomatic positions from Washington and Europe to austere and difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere, in what she dubbed "transformational democracy."


"After a very rare period in American history in which we fought two wars, Secretary Rice felt it was time to reach out and shore up our alliances around the world and put the arguments surrounding the Iraq war behind us, and also to pay more attention to issues and regions that had perhaps been lacking attention," Burns told National Journal. In staff meetings held early each morning with top aides and assistant secretaries, Rice delivers a clear message: "Her impulse is that we need to all get out there and travel and assert American diplomatic power in the world," Burns said.


Winds of Change in Europe and Asia
After Rice's early-2005 trip to Europe and her subsequent meeting in the Oval Office, foreign dignitaries began noting a new flexibility in the Bush administration's foreign policy. To demonstrate that the United States was prepared to support a negotiated settlement on Iran, Rice formally backed the E.U.-3 negotiations and offered the carrots of potential World Trade Organization membership and a sale of some airplane parts to Iran if it would permanently abandon its uranium-enrichment program. Although the newly elected hard-line regime in Tehran rejected the deal, European officials credit Rice's flexibility with keeping them united with Washington in pressuring Iran on its nuclear program.


European officials were also pleased when the State Department allowed the U.N. Security Council to consider a resolution referring the issue of war crimes in Darfur, Sudan, to the International Criminal Court. It was a red line that the Bush administration would never have crossed in its first term, because of its strong opposition to the court. The State Department also worked closely with France to pressure Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Likewise, Rice won considerable praise in Europe, both for personally interceding in negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials on a deal to open up border crossings into Gaza and for a Balkans diplomatic initiative that produced an agreement to revise Bosnia's constitution and restart negotiations on the future status of Kosovo.


"I was skeptical at the start of the second term because I assumed there was a new tone but no new substance to the Bush foreign policy," said Philip Gordon, director of the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. "But to some of the concessions Rice has made, the first Bush team would have said 'over my dead body.' So the administration does seem to have come back around to the view that it's important to have allies and that [it needs] to improve the perception of the United States around the world. That may not be a sea change, but it's a substantive change from the dominant foreign-policy approach of the first term."


Officials in Asia have felt winds of change blowing out of Washington as well. Rice gave her chief negotiator in six-party talks with North Korea, career Foreign Service officer Christopher Hill, wider latitude to speak directly with his North Korean counterparts and to strike a deal. Within months, the talks produced a tentative agreement to end Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic and energy assistance. On January 18, Hill made an unscheduled trip to Beijing and met with his North Korean interlocutor in an effort to salvage that still-shaky deal.


Early in the first term, Bush and the neoconservatives viewed Beijing as a strategic "competitor" and a looming threat to Taiwan, and they purposely jousted with China. But Rice has now continued Colin Powell's efforts to swing the pendulum back toward a more traditional policy of engagement with Beijing based on the venerable "one-China" policy, albeit accompanied with some frank criticism of Beijing and some strategic hedging in the form of strengthened ties with Japan and India.


Betrayal, or Nothing New?
How experts view this return to a more traditionalist foreign policy depends largely on where they stand on the Bush revolution itself. "What we've seen is a real wavering on the principles that were articulated throughout the first term, when Bush seemed to be a truly revolutionary figure," said Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank and an intellectual home to many of the neoconservatives prominent in the first-term inner circle. "We were not going to let threats gather, or negotiate with terrorists and rogues. But that's essentially what's happening in the second term. Unfortunately, the Bush foreign policy right now looks uncomfortably like the Clinton foreign policy. The rhetoric is still wonderful, but there's a yawning gap between the rhetoric and the practice."


William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, suspects that less has actually changed in the Bush administration's foreign-policy outlook than meets the eye. "The mainstream establishment press is so determined to write the 'Bush Backs Off' story that they've placed Condi Rice in the moderate mold of Colin Powell, and she is good at appearing more moderate and 'realist,' and at schmoozing the foreign-policy establishment even while still pursuing Bush's core foreign policy," he said. "On Iran and North Korea, for instance, I have my doubts whether all this happy talk will succeed, but it buys time. And no one has much of an alternative right now, so it's pretty harmless. Conversely, both Bush and Rice are determined and in sync on the need to succeed in Iraq and not withdraw our troops prematurely, and they've been pretty hard-headed in their approach to China. So I think in terms of fundamental principles, Bush has remained pretty steady."


And there again is the paradox. The obvious narrative arc has Powell out, Rice up, Rumsfeld sidelined, and Cheney little changed. Yet the truth of whether the Bush administration's essential worldview has changed lies in the heart of only one man -- a president who says he was transformed by the events of 9/11. Certainly Bush's own foreign-policy instincts are no longer ambiguous or seriously in doubt: Speak bluntly and wield the big stick. Indeed, if there is a fundamental split in the second term to rival the battles in the first between the State and Defense departments, it may lie between the demands of a post-revolutionary period and the still revolutionary instincts of George W. Bush himself.


"I'll concede that there are indications that the Bush administration is at least aware that there is a price to be paid both domestically and internationally for a foreign policy widely perceived as unilateral, and that they [the administration] seem to have accepted that some problems are best dealt with through negotiations even with reprehensible regimes," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. "But when the administration so publicly holds out against a Republican-controlled Congress for the CIA's continued ability to use torture, or when they attack critics of the Iraq war for 'undermining the morale' of our troops, that all suggests to me that there's been no fundamental change in the administration's worldview. I think the main difference between the first and second terms is simply the rhetoric that accompanies Bush's actions."


The Last Revolutionary
What Bush has taken from one of the most tumultuous presidential terms in modern history is a strong faith in the ideals of freedom and democracy as a personal lodestar for navigating international relations. For a president famously disinclined to second-guess his own decisions, a focus on supplanting dictatorship with democracy in Iraq may have helped Bush avoid the cognitive dissonance that others felt at the stunning failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nor has the victory by Hamas in the Palestine election deterred Bush from his commitment to democracy. "Our nation is committed to a historic, long-term goal -- we seek the end of tyranny in our world," Bush  said in his January 31 State of the Union address. "Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends on it."


Stephen Hadley is the national security adviser. "Bush views the war on terror as an ideological struggle, and he has taken from the ideological struggles of the 20th century the lesson that to win you need an alternate ideology -- ours is freedom and democracy," he told National Journal. "The philosophy that President Bush brings to international issues holds that democracy has not only been the core of what we are as a nation for the past 200 years, but also that the desire for freedom is in the heart of every human being on the planet. He believes freedom will give the Middle East and other regions hope and make them less attractive places for terrorists. So this long-standing dispute between a 'realist' versus 'idealist' foreign policy is really beside the point. President Bush would say that for America at this time, pursuing our ideals is the most practical way of advancing our interests. Idealism and realism have converged."


In steering that convergence, Bush still sees himself as a transformative figure -- as someone who prefers to lead in bold strokes, relying heavily on his gut instincts and judgments of other world leaders to guide U.S. actions. His closest aides say that instead of leading allies through consensus-building, Bush emphasizes articulating a clear vision and then making tough decisions based on carrying that vision forward. "You say what you mean, and do what you say," Hadley said. "I think that is President Bush's style."


Top aides point to the Middle East peace process as a classic example of Bush's style in action. Despite international criticism, Bush followed his gut instinct that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a man he could trust, and that Yasir Arafat was decidedly not. Bush positioned U.S. policy behind a two-state solution, but he proclaimed for the first time that a future Palestinian state must be democratic. After the pullout of Israeli settlers and forces from Gaza, many observers were indeed hailing Sharon as the best chance for peace. "That was a classic case of Bush planting his flag outside the circle of conventional wisdom, saying, 'Here's where I stand,' and being willing to defend it. And events moved the strategic equation in his direction, and gradually, people have to acknowledge that he was right," Hadley said.


Of course, there's the more recent matter of the United States' controversial policy toward detainees and torture. Despite growing congressional opposition and withering international opprobrium, Bush stayed true to his conviction that domestic or international law cannot overly constrain the United States in prosecuting the war on terror. He threatened to veto the bill being pushed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban cruel and inhuman treatment of U.S. detainees, and then sent Cheney to Capitol Hill in an unsuccessful effort to twist the arms of wavering lawmakers. When it became impossible to defend what 90 senators decided was indefensible, Bush invited McCain to the White House and conceded the point. Bush, however, later claimed a presidential exception to the newly enacted restrictions on torture. Say what you mean, and do what you say.


"While Secretary Rice has made the administration more sensitive to the symbolic and stylistic aspects of foreign policy, she has yet to define an alternative strategy to the policies that the administration has pursued over the past three years," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and President Carter's national security adviser. "Nor has she curbed some of the rhetoric in the president's speeches that I still find full of demagoguery and apocalyptic choices between total 'victory' or 'defeat.' The world is enduring a very turbulent phase right now in which the United States needs to play a constructive and stabilizing role. Because we've engaged in conduct which is viewed as almost universally unacceptable by the civilized world, however, we've greatly undermined America's legitimacy and moral standing. I'm afraid the price for that is going to be high."


Indeed, the convergence of "idealism" and "realism" that top Bush aides talk about was forged in revolutionary fires that have already consumed a large measure of international goodwill toward the United States. Because it was married to a doctrine of unilateral pre-emption and accompanied by the invasion of Iraq, the Bush revolution is perceived by much of the world as advancing democracy at the point of a gun. The daunting challenge now before the Bush administration in the post-revolutionary era is to rally the international community behind the lofty strategic goal of spreading democracy, but through the use of more universally accepted methods. To that end, Secretary Rice and her emissaries are now traveling the globe, talking cooperation and trying to consolidate the gains of war. Meanwhile, the bold leader remains unwavering, standing atop a hillside beside a flag, searching the horizon for new enemies to confront.


On the Road
Condoleezza Rice traveled much more in her first year as secretary of State than Colin Powell did in his first year on the job.


               Condoleezza Rice   Colin Powell
                   (2005)            (2001)
First Trip          Feb. 3            Feb. 16
Miles Traveled      240,181           148,898
Countries Visited   49                37
Trips               19                12
Hours in Flight     503               311






 

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