This from Jonah Goldberg, not exactly well known for being a free minded measured critic of the Bush administration.
In short, since the Axis of Evil speech, which seems like an age ago, it seems like virtually every major strategy proposed by the Bush team has flunked, even by their own metrics.
Afghanistan: undeniably, the rush to Iraq cut short any serious effort to win over this country. The Taliban seems set to take over most of the country again. Opuim crops are booming.
Iraq: As we stand down, a civil war stands up
Iran: on its way to having nukes
North Korea: on it’s way to having nukes
By an large, even conservative minded diplomats have stated that the diplomacy of the Bush approach has basically turned tense negotiations with enemies into completely antagonistic games of cat and mouse.
This isn’t really a “Democrats do it right, Republicans do it wrong” issue either. There were countless conservative diplomats in the Reagan and Bush administrations: perhaps some of the best in history. The Bush administration seems have acted in ways completely incompatible with lessons learned on the right and the left.
Donald Gregg, National Security Advisor for George H. W. Bush, on North Korea:
In short, hasn’t the Bush approach to foriegn policy turned out to be a grostesque and predictable (not to mention predicted) failure on virtually all counts?
Well, Bush’s policy WRT North Korea is not to have one. It was left to China to keep their neighbor in line. That doesn’t seem to have worked out too well.
I’m poking around on Whitehouse.gov looking for some kind of policy statement on nuclear proliferation but coming up empty. Here is the Policies & Initiatives page (sidebar at right).
Iraq should be a democratic beacon to the ME, not a disaster.
Afghanistan should be a democratic beacon to the ME, not a disaster.
Iran should not get nukes.
NK should not get nukes.
At present, it looks like only #3 has any chance of working out, but only because it isn’t a settled question yet. Certainly the situations have deteriorated in terms of being able to have any sort of productive dialog and win or enforce concessions on the part of Iran or NK.
Take Jonah Golberg’s point: Bush said that he’d do anything to prevent NK from getting nukes. Five years out, I’m not sure I name anything the Bush administration HAS done to prevent NK (other than “we’re not going to talk to you: Silent Treatment (snap snap!)”), and NK is getting nukes. Eh? What happened to “do anything”? Unless what Bush really meant was “wait till they get nukes. Then, threaten war.”
Um Libya was at least arguably won via the efforts of other nations. The US eventually jumped into the party afterwards and has tried to claim that it is responsible for everything (you know, because America is Number One and all). But claiming that Libya is a diplomatic success of the US looks like a pretty wacky case to try and make. At best you could argue that Britian and other EU nations used the US as bad cop… but they were still the ones that did most of the foot work.
Of course Bush’s foreign policy is a total failure. He had no foreign policy when he became president. Shit, it was only after 9/11 that he even realized “forners” were out there. Bush would have been a mediocre domestic president if everything had been rosy for 4-8 years. But 9/11 happened and the shit’s hit the fan since then. Failure to plan is a plan to fail and all that.
Actually, on the domestic side his team pretty much blew Katrina also, so maybe not even a mediocre domestic leader.
Israel another shining beacon. bush came to office saying there’s nothing I can do, and still got sucked into a deeper moras. if he had been proactive from the start, things might not be as bad as they are today.
the white house can’t even manage a state vist from china.
don’t forget how much goodwill we’ve burned and squandered with our friends, let alone the rest of the world
I think the whole “democratic beacon” is a much longer term goal, but of course they’re not there yet. I suspect they never will be, but it’s a still a bit early to tell. I certainly don’t think Bush expected that either would be as bad now as they are, nor did he ever communicated to us that he thought that would be the case. Bush played an extremely active role in dealing with both those countries and deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the present condition, although more so in Iraq than Afghanistan since the latter has been transitioning to NATO control for some time now (it’s fully under NATO control now).
I put these guys in a different category, because I’m not sure there’s all that much Bush or any president could do to stop them form getting nukes if that’s what they want. It’s not a matter of just finding the thing they want instead of nukes and then offering them that, because the thing they want is… nukes.
As for negotiations, correct me if I’m wrong, but Korea withdrew from the negotiations sometime in 2002, but went back to the 6-party bargaining table in 2003. Since then there have been a series of negotiations in which the US was a participant. I don’t see the value in separate talks-- that just lets NK divide and conquer. Still, Bush is going to get “blamed” for whatever happens on his watch. That’s the political reality. Just like Reagan gets “credit” for the crumbling of the Soviet empire. The fact is, though, the Soviet empire was crumbling for quite some time before Reagan came to office, and NK and Iran were persuing nukes long before Bush came to power.
Similarly with Iran, I think the US is wise in sticking with the plan to negotiate thru the Europeans, although it might be better if the US were an active member of that negotiating group. Isn’t one of the biggest complaints about Bush is his go-it-alone policy? With Iran and NK he is not going-it-alone. And as I said in one of the other threads on this topic, I think it’s wrong to assume that US is in charge of fixing whatever is wrong with the world. It was wrong to do that in Iraq, and it would be wrong to do that (alone) in NK or Iran.
Miller: Yep, that was supposed to a reference to the famous Poland remark. Glad you saw it.
Again, the standard was “do whatever it takes to prevent NK from obtaining nuclear weapons.”
As far as I can tell, “whatever it takes” was “refuse to talk to them directly or give them the rather trivial concessions they demanded” and now they seem to have or are quite close to having nuclear weapons. Whatever happened to “whatever it takes”? No, we aren’t destined to solve all these problems, but that’s just a dodge: it was Bush that laid out that these were the Axis of Evil, and we simply would not stand them anymore after 9/11. What was that supposed to mean?
As to Iraq and Afghanistan, I disagree: the results of both situations have turned out to be exactly the opposite of what the stated goals were for getting involved in them in the first place. If they might end up as stable democracies sometime in the distant future is irrelevant: instead of safety and stability, we’ve ended up with chaos. Instead of challenging Al Qaeda, we are to the point were Al Qaeda and Osama seem to both explicitly want and benefit from our policies (the CIA, in fact, concluded that Osama wanted to influence the 2004 elections precisely to keep Bush in power and continuing things on their present course).
Honestly, I have no idea what this means other than a sentence that stands in for a reason for not doing anything. Divide and conquer what? The fact is, we are THE major military world power, the biggest ally of South Korea, and the cheif nuclear nation on the planet. Its no surprise that they would want direct negotiations with us more than anyone else. If that’s one of their petty demands, what do we lose by conceeding it?
As simplistic as that sounds, I think there’s a lot of truth in it. I still believe that’s why the Bush Administration ignored the Al Queda assessments left by the Clinton people, among other things.
I don’t know if it is more frustrating because North Korea was so open about the whole thing or not. Basically, they jumped up and down and yelled as loudly as they could at each and every step of the way. “We’re going to break open the seals on the storage facility!” “Here we are backing the truck up!” “Okay, now we’re loading it up!” “We are going to test our missile capabilities! Again!”
And at each and every step, Bush’s reply was “La la la la la. I can’t hear you!” Or, worse, a schoolgirl approach: “Well, I’m not talking to Becky. Brittany and Casey, please tell Becky that she cannot develop a nuclear device, or I’ll never, ever speak to her again.”
Bush’s foreign policy, which, if you’ll recall was to be more humble on the world stage, has been a disaster of outrageous proportions.
How about the relationship with Europe? Blowing such an enormous wad of goodwill built up during generations. Of course, it has been a trope among supporters of the Bush administration that anything done in regards to Europe is OK, since we’re “irrelevant”. A hint: the fact that we’re laid-back and peaceful and unlikely to hurt anybody doesn’t mean that you’ll never need us as friends.
Risking the special relationship with the UK by having Blair do things despicable to the majority of that country?
The policy toward the UN? Huge, big disaster in the long run. A credible, neutral UN, backed by America, would have been an excellent conflict-resolving tool and much, much cheaper than constant intervention.
I think this is a colossal failure of the Bush administration. Just put yourself in the North Koreans’ shoes. Bush singles you out in a State of the Union address as being part of an “axis of evil”. Bush invades another “member” of that axis and overthrows its government. There are 37,000 American troops stationed just across your border. Is it really so surprising that in that situation, you might not feel unthreatened and you might want to arm yourself by the most effective means possible? If Bush hadn’t been so busy waving his sword, he might have had a chance to use diplomacy to keep the nuke club as small as possible.
This reminds me that I meant to come back to this point in my post above: North Korea was so overt about each step of the process that even a casual observer had to wonder if they weren’t just trying to get Bush to engage with them.
I guess brinksmanship only works if both parties want to avoid going over the brink. A nuclear North Korea is in many ways a good thing for Bush, however. Terribly bad for the US and the world, but good for Bush.