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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The bumbling and arrogance of the administration has made the Middle East -- and the world -- a more dangerous place.
Apr 2, 2002 | The Bush administration's foreign policy is in shambles. Each passing day in the Middle East brings new horrors, new bloodshed, new hatred. And it isn't just the Middle East: The bankruptcy of the Republican administration's approach, not just to the most explosive and strategically crucial region in the world, but to foreign policy in general, has become impossible to ignore. In a little over a year in office, Bush has allowed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis to explode from a small brush fire to a raging conflagration; squandered the global goodwill toward the United States after Sept. 11; set back the cause of moderates in Iran with a comic-book invocation of "evil"; endangered key allies in South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; failed to pursue vital peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan; clumsily pushed the Arab world into greater solidarity with Saddam Hussein; put forward a potentially dangerous new first-use nuclear doctrine; and filled our European allies with contempt and rage at our heavy-handed unilateralism. The Bush administration is rapidly staking a claim as the most incompetent foreign policy presidency in the post-Vietnam era.
The most alarming thing is that Bush's foreign-policy train wreck is no accident: He and his advisors planned the whole mess. As Nicholas Lemann pointed out last week in his revealing New Yorker report on the Bush administration's global strategy, key strategists like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz drafted a brief laying out their aggressive vision of America's global role back in 1990 during Bush I. The centerpiece: a vision of the U.S. as world hegemon, "shaping" (i.e., initiating) rather than reacting to events, and preventing any other country from challenging our domination.
The junior Bush began to act on this decade-old blueprint as soon as he took office, angering European allies with heavy-handed unilateral moves on global warming, missile defense and other issues. But Sept. 11 gave him the domestic political cover to accelerate the process. An enraged and fearful nation anxious to retaliate and wipe out the enemy that had grievously wounded it was not going to ask too many questions about the ultimate goals of U.S. foreign policy. The long-standing strategic centerpiece of the new Rule-America doctrine -- invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein -- suddenly could be sold as a legitimate security move against "global terrorism," not as strategic adventurism intended to impose a new joint U.S.-Israel-Turkey strategic axis in the region and show the Arabs who was boss. Support for Israel in its semi-war against the Palestinians -- support going beyond even the usual blank-check American endorsement -- could be justified in the same way, as "refusing to negotiate with terrorists."
These policies reflect a long-term strategic vision; they're not tactical improvisations. For that reason, it is unlikely that either Bush or his key aides see anything particularly troubling about the current bloody crisis in the Mideast, although they may be slightly worried by the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian violence. In their triumphalist universe, the fact that virtually the entire rest of the world is opposed to American policies means nothing. What Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and company believe is no secret: We have the power, God and right are on our side and we're going to tell the rest of the world what to do. For too long, under liberal apologists like Clinton, America crept around asking permission and apologizing -- no more. America is now the world's only superpower, and we can basically do whatever we want. Those puling Euros may cavil, the eternally angry Arabs may loudly wail -- so what? As Bush house intellectuals Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami are fond of repeating, the backward Arabs respect only force. (For some reason, the relentless Palestinians have not yet gotten this message.) A boot in the teeth will set them straight, and then America will go about its God-given mission of making the rest of the world safe for U.S. strategic and business interests.
The arrogance and riskiness of this position is breathtaking. The most immediate danger is that the Bush administration will decide to run the Middle East as our personal fiefdom, with Israel as the local Sparta doing our enforcing. This has long been a subtext in American strategic policy, but talk of invading Iraq and, even more, green-lighting Sharon's iron-fisted military responses with no political track is putting us directly on that course. This would be disastrous: The already-shaky despotisms in Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be even more threatened by rage from below, and fearing new regimes that would threaten our interests, we would probably decide to prop them up -- a recap of our disgraceful intervention in Iran in 1953 that would focus Muslim rage directly at the U.S. One need not point out the grave dangers that would attend such rage -- and only a blind optimist would have faith that our military and security forces could protect us from its consequences. The U.S. has always stood alone with Israel against the world -- but now we seem to be trying to put our head directly in the suicidal terrorists' target.
But the problems presented by the new American triumphalism go beyond the Middle East. No country, no matter how powerful, exists apart from the rest of the community of nations. Diplomacy and international relations are fragile things that can be destroyed by rough handling, with painful results in almost every sphere of public life. Realpolitik and "realism" has its place, but it must be tempered by strategic thinking that includes the necessity of giving up short-term gain for long-term stability, even of altruism. Nor does the banner of "the war on terrorism" serve as a sufficiently transcendental, or for that matter coherent, rallying flag for the rest of the world to follow. As students of the term have long realized, and the current Middle East situation proves, defining "terrorism" is a political exercise. One man's "terrorist" is another man's "freedom fighter."
Bush's brash imperial reach has not yet sparked a strong response from the American left. This is due in part to the feelings of national solidarity that rightly sprung up after Sept. 11, when the country rallied to destroy the al-Qaida terrorist threat. The left's response has also been muted by the strong passions that many liberals feel for Israel. And finally, the stunning ambition of Bush's global policy has not yet fully sunk in, since it represents a sharp departure from the mainstream foreign policy doctrine of the post-Vietnam period.
