Bush's bad foreign policy: unilateralism and remaking the world don't mix - Book Review

Reason, Feb, 2004 by Steve Chapman

America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 238 pages, $22.95

PERHAPS NO COUNTRY in history had ever enjoyed the position that the United States held in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. The U.S. was so pre-eminent in military power as to be unchallengeable in any serious way, but it was also widely admired and emulated. We enjoyed unparalleled influence that could be sustained without the use of force. We had no enemies of any consequence. America was unbound and, at least in relative terms, unburdened.

September 11, 2001, closed that chapter in our history. Yet stunning as that day was, it ultimately served to enhance America's stature and its security. Horrified by the sight of those vast towers collapsing into dust, the world rallied behind the United States. The Bush administration resolved to punish Al Qaeda and its allies, making sure they could never hurt us again. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban regime that had harbored Osama bin Laden.

That moment marked a new pinnacle, demonstrating how quickly and easily the United States could apply its military power to destroy its enemies. Our speedy, almost cost-free victory came as a welcome surprise to our friends and sent a stark warning to anyone inclined to challenge us.

The attainment of nearly complete security, however, made some Americans, including the president, even less tolerant of the dangers that remained. One in particular stood out: Saddam Hussein. Never mind that he had been defeated, deranged, isolated, and contained. Never mind that he had not attacked the United States, threatened to attack the United States, or acquired the means to attack the United States. He was a longstanding nuisance, one that Bush decided not to tolerate any longer.

How different things look now. Instead of having the sympathy and support of the world, the United States has become a near-pariah. Instead of being able to mobilize the United Nations and other institutions behind our various ventures, we find the U.N. resisting, obstructing, and at the very least declining to provide much help. Other countries paid most of the cost of the first Gulf War. This time we're facing a large and growing bill almost alone. Despite the U.N. resolution in October that gave the American occupation effort an international mandate, few countries have offered substantial financial help, much less military support.

Worse, the invasion of Iraq led to a debilitating, open-ended guerrilla war in a Third World country where public sentiment runs the gamut from impatient to hostile. Six months after the president declared the end of major combat operations in May, we had suffered nearly 2,300 casualties, put terrific strains on the military services, incurred a cost that has already reached $155 billion, and isolated ourselves diplomatically.

Rebuilding Iraq has been a much greater undertaking than the administration expected, and many problems that were supposed to be solved by a U.S. occupation have gotten more intractable, not less. For example, rather than being cowed by American might, North Korea and Iran, the other two members of Bush's "axis of evil," have made progress toward becoming full-fledged nuclear states. The Arab-Israeli conflict has continued to spill blood on both sides. Terrorists who had been beleaguered and marginalized are now on the offensive in the chaos of postwar Iraq.

The crackup didn't happen by accident. In America Unbound, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay argue that the war reflected Bush's approach to foreign policy: assertive, unilateral, enamored of pre-emptive action, and eager not to contain enemy regimes but to eliminate them.

During the Cold War, anti-communists dreamed of rolling back the tide of Soviet conquests but were constrained by the threat of nuclear war. Bush was able to take a more aggressive approach, Daalder and Lindsay write, because of his "belief that nobody could push back." Nor was he about to be inhibited by the fear of alienating other countries. In a unipolar world, Bush felt the United States had the right, the duty, and the power to act entirely on its own to advance its interests. By acting on that belief, the authors contend, Bush "set in motion a revolution in American foreign policy. It was not a revolution in America's goals abroad, but rather in how it achieved them."

Daalder and Lindsay, who toil respectively at the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, don't pretend that Bush is a dedicated student of international relations. But they give him credit for having clear instincts and admire his determination to act on them. Those who assumed he would be the captive of his advisers were badly mistaken, they contend: "He may have entered the Oval Office not knowing which general ran Pakistan, but during his first thirty months in office, he was the puppeteer, not the puppet. He governed as he said he would on the campaign trail." His philosophy, expressed before and after the election, was that "America should use its primacy to advance its interests and values, not to curry favor with foreign countries." Daalder and Lindsay see him as "a revolutionary" who has distinguished himself by being "bold rather than timid, proactive rather than reactive."