The Retrac administration?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, August 11, 2008 - 1:00 PM Share

Fareed Zakaria has a cover story in Newsweek on how the Bush administration's current foreign policy ain't what it used to be:

A broad shift in America's approach to the world is justified and overdue. Bush's basic conception of a "global War on Terror," to take but the most obvious example, has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades. But blanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality. The administration that became the target of so much passion and anger—from Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone—is not quite the one in place today. The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them.

Read the whole thing, and not just because Zakaria cites your humble blogger. In some ways, this Bush administration is the mirror image of the Carter administration's experience in foreign policy (hence the title of this post). In both cases, a new administration rejected both the prior administration's grand strategy -- and spurned the intellectual traditions of their own party -- to chart out a new approach to foreign policy. Both of these new approaches In both cases, these new approaches yielded more failures than successes. And, in both cases, the president altered his approach in response to these failures -- to the point where the foreign policies of their last year in office strongly resembled the status quo they had inherited. Of course, the difference, crudely put, is that Carter moved from dovish to hawkish, while Bush has done the reverse.

EXPLORE:U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, BUSH, CARTER

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ALASKA JACK

4:40 PM ET

August 11, 2008

I never bought the most

I never bought the most fundamental, widely accepted basic criticism of the Bush foreign policy approach: That it was unilateral. This is almost entirely based on Iraq, as far as I can tell, and what's more, a revisionist account of what actually took place there. The administration *begged* other countries to sign on. The fact that most of those countries refused -- for a variety of self-interested reasons -- is not the same thing as the administration simply deciding we were better off without them.

There are plenty of counterexamples -- North Korea perhaps the most obvious -- but they don't fit into the "Bush is a napoleonic menace who thinks America should just do whatever it wants" theme that lets us feel all smug and superior to that obvious idiot.

Note that I am not a fan of the Bush administration, but for different (and IMO much more valid) reasons.

- Alaska Jack

USELESS SAM GRANT

7:49 PM ET

August 11, 2008

Well, there you have it. It

Well, there you have it. It is now a universal truth that the Bush administration has been bad. (I don't buy it.)

And now the format du jour has become "I'm no fan of Bush, but insert something positive about Bush here..." or "I support Bush, but he's wrong/an idiot/insert your criticism here..." Take your pick, they are both on the menu.

ZATHRAS

11:31 PM ET

August 11, 2008

Since there is an excellent

Since there is an excellent chance that the American public, in its wisdom, is about to put a complete novice in foreign and national security affairs in the White House for the third time in a row, Zakaria's message about the importance of continuity is timely.

Every administration that has had any success in foreign and defense policy built much of that success on the work of its immediate predecessors, no matter how how much criticism they had exchanged during the campaign. Carter completed negotiations in the Middle East and with Panama that had been begun during the Nixon and Ford administrations; Reagan picked up many defense platforms begun in the Carter Pentagon; Bush inherited Reagan's responsiveness to Gorbachev's leadership; and Clinton secured ratification of the NAFTA agreement largely negotiated during Bush's administration. The younger Bush, more completely a creature of the permanent campaign even than Clinton, took much more seriously than earlier Presidents had campaign rhetoric about setting a new course and repudiating policy directions associated with the other party's President.

The results of this we have seen. Not for the first time in Bush's life, he has had to be bailed out by other people who, for various reasons, either cannot or will not say that bailing him out is what they are trying to do. Bush initiated none of the course corrections Zakaria refers to; the most he has done is reduce Vice President Cheney's ability to block them, especially by moving Donald Rumsfeld out of the Pentagon after the 2006 elections. Cheney's influence remains formidable, leaving the American public and foreign governments in doubt as to whether corrections of earlier foreign policy mistakes are really being made or are just being suggested by administration officials who may be overruled later.

But the next President would be ill-advised to reverse course on every policy direction now being pursued by Bush administration officials. If this election is to be about anything important, it must be about repudiating Bush and the way he has conducted himself as President. It wouldn't make sense for the next President to interpret his election as a mandate to repudiate Henry Paulson or Robert Gates.