High World Stakes
The urgency of a second Bush term.
By Adam Wolfson
Bush's speech was the latest effort by the administration to stop the slipping support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq at home and abroad. Though he had previously mentioned the spread of Mideast democracy as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, Bush elevated that rationale to primacy yesterday, making no mention of weapons of mass destruction and only passing reference to national security and terrorism.
— The Washington Post, November 7, 2003
Could this be so? Has President Bush somehow done a Woodrow Wilson makeover? Has the president changed the rationale of the war from defending the United States from terrorism to a selfless "crusade" for democracy? Well, not exactly. Bush's argument in his landmark address before the National Endowment of Democracy on Thursday was in fact far more interesting and challenging than reported.
His argument has been largely misunderstood because it draws upon an almost-forgotten foreign-policy tradition in America — one that is neither strictly "realist" nor "idealist." Bush's speech hearkens back to the "idealistic realism" of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. The case President Bush made is not the Wilsonian one of making the world safe for democracy. Rather, his abiding concern, as was TR's, is to make the world safe for the United States.
Here's what Bush said: He pointed out that 60 years of a cold, calculating "realism" in our foreign policy towards the Middle East — one that accommodated despots as long as they were on "our side" — made the country neither safe nor served our national interest. Now, in making this acknowledgment, Bush was hardly offering a Clinton-like apology for past wrongs committed by the United States. He was simply pointing out that the old policy in the Mideast had failed to deliver. It was, one might say, not at all realistic about the true agenda of all those "friendly" kings, princes, and strongmen who currently rule over the Arab world. Authoritarian states like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, no matter how much oil they might sell us, do not serve our genuine national interests. There can be no community of concern between democrats and non-democrats. As Bush put it, "in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of...violence ready for export."
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