FANTASY COWBOY
New York Post
By JOHN PODHORETZ
July 11, 2006 -- IT'S "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," Time magazine declares on its cover this week. Interesting. President Bush's antagonists and enemies have spent nearly five years perfecting a caricature of his foreign-policy and warmaking views, and now self-satisfiedly declare that their caricature of Bush has been overtaken by events.
The profound difficulties of the war in Iraq have, in the eyes of the caricaturists, exposed the failure of Bush's supposedly swaggering foreign policy. The United States isn't standing so tall, walking so proud or throwing its weight around so baldly after three-plus years in Iraq, say the caricaturists.
Why, even the president himself has said he shouldn't have used the wanted-poster "dead or alive" formulation when talking about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are back making mischief in Afghanistan, and bin Laden is still on the loose.
And where is all the talk of the "Axis of Evil" now that North Korea is test-firing missiles and Iran is declaring its intention to go nuclear?
"Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing," write Time's Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar. "Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation."
Cleverly put - but absurd. Bush's stance toward North Korea has been basically unchanged since the summer of 2002, when Pyongyang announced it had created fissile material. The administration did not react with belligerence at the time, choosing instead to place the issue in the hands of a six-nation task force. The North Korea policy has always been the real-world refutation of the ludicrous suggestion that Bush always seeks to go it alone in the world.
Indeed, a more sensible critique of the Bush administration's North Korea policy would be to call into question the use of this multilateral negotiating system with a regime as recalcitrant as Kim Jong Il's. Maybe what was needed was more belligerence, not less.
Or maybe, just maybe, the North Korea problem indicates that presidents are somtimes faced with lousy options all around. Belligerence seemed out of the question with North Korea, since the regime seems capable of starting a war at a moment's notice. Every president since Ronald Reagan has decided that the only prudent course with Pyongyang is some form of bribery, since the prospect of war on the Korean peninsula could lead to the deaths of millions and the potential for a breakout of regional hostilities with no good foreseeable outcome.
Whatever is the case, George W. Bush never swaggered toward North Korea, never used "cowboy diplomacy," whatever that cutesy phrase might mean.
Still, we can all see how world events and the war in Iraq have made Bush's foreign policy seem problematic. But have the problems discredited the Bush foreign-policy doctrine? That's a different question.
Think, for example, about the scoffing references to Bush's "Axis of Evil" conceit - the notion that Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed special and particular threats to America and the world. It was denounced as simplistic and belligerent when it was first presented in the 2002 State of the Union address. Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking for the Democratic mainstream, called the phrase "a big mistake."
But now, four years later, some Democrats are trying to outflank Bush and the Republicans on the right by offering Bushite solutions to the North Korean crisis.
For example, former Defense Secretary William Perry has called for a preemptive strike against Pyongyang. This is especially startling, for Perry's signal achievement during the Clinton years was negotiating the so-called Agreed Framework, under which the United States basically paid the North Koreans billions not to go nuclear - an agreement that North Korea clearly violated with impunity, since it announced it had created fissile material only 16 months into the Bush presidency.
Remember, the hallmark of the Bush doctrine is preemption - the explicit statement by Bush and his administration that the United States will consider preemptive attack as a tool against the spread of weapons of mass destruction that might menace America.
So, even as Time magazine is declaring an end to the Bush doctrine, Bill Clinton's defense secretary has offered what one must assume is a serious proposal to act preemptively against North Korea before it develops a workable long-range missile.
What this suggests is that the Bush doctrine has succeeded in doing what doctrines do - it has made preemption a thinkable strategic and tactical option for the United States. And that won't change no matter who the next president |
