"Especially as a Social Democrat," said German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier a few days after the U.S. elections, "I am glad that Barack Obama won. All night I sat in front of my TV and was enthusiastic and elated." The minister's merriment reflects the mood all over Old Europe: anticipation of the end of the Bush nightmare and hope for change under St Obama, the lightworker. It's a wonder there were no parades--yet.
While such views are not new among Europeans and the American left, it was astounding to witness the sheer number of conservatives jumping ship and bashing Bush. With even erstwhile staunch Bush supporters such as John Bolton attesting the Bush administration's "total intellectual collapse" (on occasion of the North Korea deal), the verdict is in: President Bush, especially because of his foreign policy, has been an utter failure.
Contesting this judgment is not a popular pastime these days, not even among Republicans. Given the glum political atmosphere in a year of dismal election results, this might be understandable. And true enough, many of the Bush administration's key foreign policy decisions have turned out more difficult than anticipated--most notably the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the long run, however, the Bush legacy will most certainly receive a fair treatment, emphasizing those achievements now buried under partisan politics and veiled by the inevitable problems that accompany the implementation of every groundbreaking policy. In fact, future U.S. administrations will be well-advised to build on the core ideas formulated and realized by the Bush administration. After all, there are at least three reasons to applaud the Bush foreign policy.
1. The Bush administration developed the first coherent vision for an American role in the post-Cold War world.
Victory in the Cold War led to years of confusion in American politics. Bush senior, troubled by the "vision thing," was the steward of stability whose "New World Order" never had any meaning until Hulk Hogan introduced the concept to World Championship Wrestling in 1996. After the realist stasis, the liberal internationalist Bill Clinton embraced the buzz word of the decade, "globalization," and cast an ever-more intricate web of international treaties and institutions, designed to create an interdependent world of peace and prosperity--under the headline of "engagement and enlargement." Well, this tumescent globaloney was too much to take even for Clinton's own Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, who deemed the whole visionary strategy "a trade policy masquerading as foreign policy."
On 9/11, it became obvious that foreign policy needs to be about more than making money. The twin challenges of (mostly Islamist) anti-modern backlash and failing states breeding instability had been rising all throughout the 1990s, but it was due to the catalytic attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administration's leadership that the U.S. finally came up with a viable approach to post-Cold War foreign policy. The new doctrine identified the main threats to a liberal world order: terrorism, states sponsoring terrorism, and the nexus between weapons of mass destruction, irresponsible regimes, and terrorist organizations. It also outlined a strategy of forward deterrence to counter these threats: combat al-Qaeda militarily and destroy the structures which made its rise possible by stabilizing failed states and democratizing the Broader Middle East.
Granted, despite considerable progress in some areas, none of these ambitious goals has been fulfilled yet. Still, Bush has given the unfolding global conflict a name, identified the enemy, developed a doctrine to fight and win this struggle, and has begun to implement a strategy based on this doctrine. That is, in historic terms, not a small achievement.
What most contemporary critics fail to recognize is that at its most basic, this "Bush Doctrine," just as the war on terror, is less about preemption and regime change than about the understanding that the liberal international system is in peril and that the United States is the only capable custodian of this system. Even without a Cold War substitute, the free world depends on U.S. leadership and assertiveness--this is the lesson his successors should learn from Bush.
2. The Bush administration fought the right wars and laid the groundwork for winning them.
