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I appreciate the tenor of the author’s essay, but am skeptical that the
same administration that brought such travails and calamity can simultaneously reverse
it’s precipitous path without changing the rhetoric. As he says below, it’s as
if everyone got the Get Real memo except Cheney and Bush. The disconnect is
more than managerial, it’s undermining years of global work like compounded
interest on a runaway credit card.
Bolton, Feith and Wolfowitz may be sidelined, but the CIC (commander in
chief) and his concierge are still diehard true believers, regardless of the
facts and events that have disproved them. The Bush administration’s declining approval numbers are not just about
the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and the “direction the
country is going” – it has lost considerable credibility, and can only blame
itself for that. It’s hard to imagine a hemorrhaging administration taking the lead
horse on the battlefield. They need more than a fresh horse, they need
accountability. KwC Get Real Gideon Rose is the managing editor of
Foreign Affairs. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/ First-term foreign policy hardliners like John Bolton, Paul
Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith have moved to jobs outside of Washington or left
the administration entirely. The State Department has regained the ear of the
White House and won support for repairing relations with Europe and negotiating
with Iran and North Korea. And the Pentagon, overextended and trapped in a grueling
counterinsurgency, has taken to rehashing Kerry campaign rhetoric about the
limited utility of military force, lowered its expectations in Iraq and sent up
trial balloons about withdrawal. The only people not to have gotten the
memorandum, it seems, are the president and vice president, who feebly insist
that the "war on terror" remains a useful concept and that everything
in Iraq is going just fine. What explains the shift? Administration supporters either
deny it has occurred or argue that it constitutes only a slight change in
tactics, appropriate to a world already improved by the administration's
earlier pugnacity. Journalists and administration critics, meanwhile, generally
attribute it to haphazard changes in politics or personnel, such as declining
poll numbers or the brilliant performance of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of
State. The
real story is simpler: the Bush doctrine has collapsed, and the administration
has consequently embraced realism, American foreign policy's perennial hangover
cure. For more than half a century, overenthusiastic idealists of
one variety or another have gotten themselves and the country into trouble
abroad and had to be bailed out by prudent successors brought in to clean up
the mess. When the crisis passes, however, the realists' message about the need
to act carefully in a fallen world ends up clashing with Americans' loftier
impulses. The result is a tedious cycle that plays itself out again and again. By 1952, the Truman administration had gotten the nation
trapped in a seemingly endless conflict in a strange place halfway around the
globe. Dwight Eisenhower, who rode to the White House on a platform of cutting
the country's losses, worked to balance budgets, end the Korean War and keep
out of further military trouble. His realism worked as policy, but it did not
offer the rhetorical and ideological red meat the American public craves. That
left Vice President Richard Nixon open to his opponent's charges, in the 1960
election, that the administration had displayed cramped vision and a lack of
vigor. The victorious John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon
Johnson set about paying any price and bearing any burden for their ideals.
Eight years later, confronted with another endless war, Americans decided it
was time for some old-fashioned realism again. As president, Nixon inherited not only the mess in Vietnam
but also hostile relationships with two major nuclear-armed powers. Trying to
bring American resources and commitments into balance with each other and with
the global realities of power, he and Henry Kissinger, his consigliere,
extricated the United States from Vietnam, forged a new relationship with the
Soviet Union and started a rapprochement with China. For this among other things, they were vilified as
cold-blooded amoral schemers out of touch with American principles and values,
and were promptly succeeded by a left-wing idealist (Jimmy Carter) and then a
right-wing one (Ronald Reagan). Both regimes denounced Nixon and Kissinger's
realism, dedicated themselves to moralism in foreign policy and had more than
their share of foreign policy failures. (Reagan got lucky in the end, but was
able to capitalize on the luck only by embracing Mikhail Gorbachev against the
advice of his own more ideological aides.) George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft then offered an
updated and nonpathological version of the Nixon-Kissinger approach and
presided over the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the
peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union, and the reversal of the occupation of
Kuwait. Their reward? To be hounded from office after one term and derided as
cold-blooded amoralists. They, too, were succeeded by a left-wing idealist
(Bill Clinton) and then a right-wing one (George W. Bush), who once again
loudly dedicated themselves to moralism in foreign policy and had more than
their share of failures. Mr. Clinton came to office decrying his predecessor's
callous aloofness from Balkan conflicts and his coddling of "the butchers
of Beijing." He was quickly forced to change his tune and spent much of
his two terms marking time while dithering over just how American power could
and should be used abroad. The younger Mr. Bush talked a realist game on the campaign
trail but morphed into the grandest of all visionaries after the attacks of
Sept. 11. Following a quick success in Afghanistan, however, over the next few
years all three pillars of the supposedly revolutionary Bush doctrine -
pre-emption, regime change, and a clear division between those "with
us" and "against us"- came crashing down. What the administration meant by pre-emption was really
preventive war, a concept whose poor reputation has been reinforced by the
failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq together with the costly and
bungled occupation. Regime change was based on the idea that problems abroad
stem from the nature of certain foreign governments and can be fully solved
only by replacing them with better ones. Today, as during the Cold War, it remains a worthwhile goal
unmatched by a practical strategy for achieving it. And as for dividing the
world between friends and foes, the Bush team-like all its predecessors-has
found itself stuck dealing primarily with inconvenient cases in the middle,
from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to China and France. Seen in proper perspective, in other words, the Bush
administration's signature efforts represent not some durable, world-historical
shift in America's approach to foreign policy but merely one more failed
idealistic attempt to escape the difficult trade-offs and unpleasant
compromises that international politics inevitably demand - even from the
strongest power since Rome. Just as they have so many times before, the
realists have come in after an election to offer some adult supervision and
tidy up the joint. This time it's simply happened under the nose of a
victorious incumbent rather than his opponent (which may account for the
failure to change the rhetoric along with the policy). BEING fully American rather than devotees of classic
European realpolitik, the realists-today represented most prominently by Ms.
Rice and her team at the State Department-offer not different goals but a
calmer and more measured path toward the same ones. They still believe in
American power and the global spread of liberal democratic capitalism. But they
seek legitimate authority rather than mere material dominance, favor
cost-benefit analyses rather than ideological litmus tests, and prize good
results over good intentions. So what can we expect next? A spell of calm without dramatic
visionary campaigns or new wars, along with an effort to gradually wind down
the current conflict while leaving Iraq reasonably stable but hardly a liberal
democracy. This is likely to play well - until domestic carping over the
realists' supposedly limited vision starts the wheel of American foreign policy
turning once again. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/opinion/18rose.html |
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