Square One No Longer Exists

It's been interesting to watch the current administration scramble in an attempt to undo all of the mischief they created in the world the past seven years. After relying on only one kind of foreign policy, bombs, and getting failure after failure, it suddenly dawned on somebody at the White House that maybe a different approach might be necessary. Unfortunately, the new approach, diplomacy, comes far too late to be successful. Just why this is so is explained nicely in an op-ed piece written by Professors Steven Weber and Bruce W. Jentleson and published in today's Los Angeles Times.

In 2001, the administration declared a revolution in the practice and substance of U.S. foreign policy. It ridiculed liberal internationalist ideals of multilateral cooperation. It opposed using U.S. military power dressed up as "nation-building." It wrote off global warming as Al Gore's obsession, and it said it wouldn't get bogged down, as its predecessors had, in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Then after 9/11, the administration went even further, developing a radical new doctrine for the preemptive use of military force. The war on terrorism became its defining issue -- indeed its supreme purpose superseding all else, strategically as well as morally.

Today, the world looks very different. And in trying to reverse the damage done during its first seven years -- including an overstretched military and a loss of global prestige and influence -- the administration, ironically, has quietly adopted many of the policies it once scorned.

The article then proceeds to tick off the various Bush-made disasters.

At the end of his term, President Clinton was successfully working to preserve the benefits and correct the flaws in the 1994 Agreed Framework that aimed to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons program. After taking office in 2001, the Bush administration wrote off this progress and instead placed North Korea into the "axis of evil." It then halfheartedly went along with the six-party talks, initiated in 2003 and hosted by China, on the security issues raised by North Korea's nuclear weapons program.Meanwhile, North Korea built more warheads, declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006. ...

In the Middle East, the Bush administration backed off the traditional U.S. role of peace broker between Arabs and Israelis. "The road to Jerusalem," it explained, "runs through Baghdad." In other words, ousting Saddam Hussein was the key to unlocking a Palestinian-Israeli deal. Yet even after Hussein's fall, U.S. peace efforts amounted to little more than drive-by diplomacy, a trip here and a speech there but no sustained campaign to secure a settlement in the decades-old conflict. ...

But the idea that Iraq would be the leading edge of democratization of Arab countries in the Mideast is seldom heard anymore. And while the situation is completely different from what it was in 2000 -- Hussein is gone, there are hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in the country and there is a democratically elected government -- success in Iraq in 2008 is defined, for all intents and purposes, as containment: no weapons of mass destruction, no terrorist havens and no spillover of internal violence into other countries. That's a policy a lot like Clinton's.

The big winner of the Iraq war has been Iran, whose influence in the region has multiplied, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. After 9/11, and again in 2003, the Bush administration effectively rebuffed potential opportunities to improve relations with Iran when the Iranians hinted at a willingness to bargain.And it joined the European Union-led talks on Iran's nuclear program late in the game. Throughout, U.S. rhetoric toward Iran, also branded a member of the axis of evil, became increasingly bellicose, with threats of military action if Iran continued to pursue nuclear weapons. ...

That the new initiatives are not really gaining much in the way in traction is no surprise. The world has changed dramatically in the past seven years, especially with respect to the US role, in large part due to the flaws of the Bush "plan." There is no square one to return to, something the current crop of presidential candidates would be wise to recognize.

But the next president will not be starting from an international position similar to the one Bush inherited no matter how successful the administration is in undoing the damage of its failed policies. A once internationally weak and democratizing Russia has become an autocratic and provocative petro-state. China's economy is more than twice the size of what it was in 2000, and its global influence has correspondingly risen. And a new generation of jihadists, no less committed to violence, is eager to continue the anti-America campaign.

Some legacy, Mr. Bush.