Doctrinal Struggle
by Robert Lane Greene
The New Republic
Post date 10.15.02
An article in Sunday's Washington Post takes us back to that period late this summer when the administration seemed to be flailing on Iraq. As the now-familiar story goes, it was Vice President Dick Cheney's hawkish speech before the Nashville Veterans of Foreign Wars in August that helped reverse the momentum. But the Post adds something new to the mythology surrounding that speech: Cheney was acting almost entirely on his own. According to the article, the administration had planned to roll out its Iraq case in the autumn, but "Cheney concluded that the administration couldn't wait."
He mentioned to Bush that he planned to give a speech on Iraq, and the president contributed a few suggestions, officials recounted. Then, the day before the speech, Cheney laconically mentioned that the speech would be "pretty tough."
"Tough?" Bush asked.
"Yep," Cheney said.
"Okay," Bush replied.
What are George W. Bush's core foreign policy beliefs? No one seriously pretends to know, and what's worse, few seem to care. It seems to be taken for granted that Iraq policy will be determined by who wins the administration's internal debate--or, as the Cheney example suggests, whichever high-ranking official can substitute his own views for the president's. Hence the unofficial running score: big points for hawkish realists like Cheney and Rumsfeld when Bush first espoused "pre-emptive action when necessary" at West Point in June; a comeback for Powell and the State Department multilateralists with Bush's U.N. speech in September; a tie game after Bush's Cincinnati speech last Monday, which included just about every approach under the sun. Bush, it seems, is the scoreboard. But what would our foreign policy look like were he the key player?
There have been few indications of a core Bush doctrine--at least one that Bush personally subscribes to. On the campaign trail, Bush outlined a vision of stingy realism--employing force only when national security interests were at stake, shunning wide-ranging humanitarian engagements. As he lectured Gore during their first presidential debate, "[if] we don't have a clearer vision of the military, if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."
But ownership of this doctrine may be more appropriately assigned to Condoleezza Rice (and her mentor, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft) than Bush himself. Rice had set the campaign's foreign policy tone in a January 2000 article for Foreign Affairs titled "Promoting the National Interest," where she derided the excessive burdens Bill Clinton placed on the military. At that point, Bush was a one-and-a-half-term governor who couldn't name the leader of Pakistan.
More recently, the set of ideas first laid out in Bush's West Point speech, and which culminated in a document called "The National Security Strategy of the United States," released in September, have won acceptance as the administration's foreign policy roadmap. Critics have seized on its infatuation with America's unrivaled power and its endorsement of preemption. But it's more complicated than an apology for neorealist hawkishness. For example, when it comes to identifying rogue states, it says one thing to look out for is states that "reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands."
As Nick Lemann surmises in the current New Yorker, this is the one sentence most likely to have been shaped by the president himself. Yet Bush is clearly no wide-eyed foreign policy idealist. In a recent profile of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--someone resolutely in favor of using military force to promote American values like liberal democracy--The New York Times' Bill Keller reports that Bush remains uncommitted to the idea of using Iraq as a laboratory for nation-building. Meanwhile, outside Kabul, Afghanistan has rapidly degenerated into a battleground for rival warlords. It goes without saying that the president could beef up our presence in the provinces if he were committed to building a stable, democratic Afghanistan.
So is it possible to distill from this muddle some coherent set of foreign policy beliefs? To do so you'd need to answer two questions: Does Bush believe the objective of American foreign policy is to promote narrowly defined interests or to promote more broadly defined values? And, on a procedural level, should the United States try to achieve these objectives by working with allies and within institutions or by operating unilaterally? Since Bush's official foreign policy pronouncements don't tell us much, the only evidence we have to go on is characterological considerations.
Bush's predilections on the second question are easier to discern. Among the attributes that ring most true about Bush are his Southern governor's wariness of federal power, a certain frontier distaste for "having his hands tied" (as Ari Fleischer never hesitates to remind us), and his disdain for intellectual and cultural elitism. (Just about any serious profile of Bush, from Lemann's New Yorker profile during the campaign to Frank Bruni's recent book Ambling Into History, makes that point.) All would imply a suspicion of multilateral institutions, with their faceless international bureaucrats and their plodding, over-deliberative, style. Still, this doesn't mean opposition to all alliances--particularly informal ones. The visit of a new foreign friend to Crawford, a handshake, and (as famously with Vladimir Putin) a look deep into a man's eyes can seal a friendship with Bush. It's entirely possible that the president, who's known to place considerable value on personal loyalty, would be inclined to work informally with any number of foreign leaders if left to his own devices.
As to the first question, the most important consideration here is probably Bush's famous moral clarity. There is, for example, the president's penchant for unscripted Manichean pronouncements ("evildoers," "with us or against us," etc.). Likewise, much of the behind-the-scenes reporting after 9/11 suggested Bush saw his role as commander-in-chief in messianic terms. This, if nothing else, would suggest Bush thinks values have a place in foreign policy. On top of that, the belief Bush is said to hold most sincerely is his Christian faith in God. Bush's Christian beliefs may very well incline him toward mercy and charity--which, in practical terms, could imply support for policies like development aid, albeit tempered by Protestant notions of self-reliance.
Put that all together and you may actually get what Bush's advisers have been promising all along--something resembling a "compassionate conservative" foreign policy. Which is to say, interventions motivated by more than narrow self-interest but modest in the values they seek to promote. On Iraq that could mean military action to remove Saddam Hussein and a long-term commitment of troops to stabilize the country. But it probably falls short of aiming for Denmark on the Euphrates, as some neocons have advocated.
In any administration, it's hard to distinguish between a president's beliefs and those "beliefs" his advisers have cobbled together for him. But if all the president does is reflect the views of whichever adviser holds the greatest sway on any particular day, foreign policy will prove exceedingly arbitrary. We've heard a lot about what Bush sees when he looks foreign leaders in the eye; it's fair to ask what they see when they look in his. The answer had better not be "nothing." Worse, it had better not be, "I wonder if he can get me an appointment with Cheney."
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Robert Lane Greene is countries editor at Economist.com
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