Think Again: Bush's Foreign Policy

Not since Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Vietnam has a U.S. president's foreign policy so polarized the country -- and the world. Yet as controversial as George W. Bush's policies have been, they are not as radical a departure from his predecessors as both critics and supporters proclaim. Instead, the real weaknesses of the president's foreign policy lie in its contradictions: Blinded by moral clarity and hamstrung by its enormous military strength, the United States needs to rebalance means with ends if it wants to forge a truly effective grand strategy.

BY MELVYN P. LEFFLER | SEPTEMBER 1, 2004

"George W. Bush's Foreign Policy Is Revolutionary"

No. Bush's goals of sustaining a democratic peace and disseminating America's core values resonate with the most traditional themes in U.S. history. They hearken back to Puritan rhetoric of a city upon a hill. They rekindle Thomas Jefferson's vision of an empire of liberty. They were integral to Woodrow Wilson's missive that "the world must be made safe for democracy." They flow from Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms. They echo the noble rhetoric of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, to "oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."

Nor is unilateralism new. From America's inception as a republic, the Founding Fathers forswore entangling alliances that might embroil the fragile country in dangerous Old World controversies and tarnish the United States' identity as an exceptionalist nation. Acting unilaterally, the United States could prudently pursue its own interests, nurture its fundamental ideals, and define itself in opposition to its European forbears. This tradition is the one to which Bush returns.

Critics argue that Bush's "revolutionary" foreign policy repudiates the multilateralism that flowered after World War II and that served the United States so well during the Cold War. These critics have a point, albeit one that should not be exaggerated. The wise men of the Cold War embraced collective security, forged NATO, created a host of other multilateral institutions, and grasped the interdependence of the modern global economy. Nonetheless, they never repudiated the right to act alone. Although they reserved the option to move unilaterally, they did not declare it as a doctrine. They did precisely the opposite. Publicly, they affirmed the U.S. commitment to collective security and multilateralism; privately, they acknowledged that the United States might have to act unilaterally, as it more or less did in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Third World.

The differences between Bush and his predecessors have more to do with style than substance, more to do with the balance between competing strategies than with goals, with the exercise of good judgment than with the definition of a worldview. The perception of great threat and the possession of unprecedented power have tipped the balance toward unilateralism, but there is nothing revolutionary in Bush's goals or vision. The U.S. quest for an international order based on freedom, self-determination, and open markets has changed astonishingly little.

 

Melvyn P. Leffler is Edward Stettinius professor of American history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of the prizewinning history of the early Cold War A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).