Iraq Is Bush's Only Foreign-Policy Legacy

Hardly. There's no denying that the war in Iraq has defined the presidency of George W. Bush in important ways. But history is unlikely to remember the war as negatively as most assume.

COMMENTS (0) SHARE:

Twitter

 

Reddit

 

 

More...

It's now likely that the war will stagger to an inconclusive ending. The insurgency will shrink but not disappear. The government will function but will be divided. The U.S. military presence will be reduced but not entirely withdrawn. And Iraq's neighbors will be bruised but their geopolitical policies will stay intact. Yet, by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a nonaggressive, albeit weak, elected regime, the United States will have achieved a real improvement in the region. It will have come at a high cost in money and lives. But it will also falsify the worst predictions of the war's opponents. As the Iraq war recedes into history, it will come to be seen more like the frustrating Korean conflict, or the Philippine insurrection, rather than the debacle of Vietnam. It will be an important part of Bush's legacy, but hardly all-defining.

As time passes, other crucial decisions of the Bush years will come into sharper focus. Among the most important will be the formation of a U.S.-India military alliance. Under Bush, the United States and India (along with Australia, Japan, and Singapore) have begun joint naval exercises. The United States and India signed a treaty to share nuclear materials in 2007. The United States is offering India fighter planes, warships, and other equipment sales that could total as much as $100 billion during the next 10 years. Otto von Bismarck once famously predicted that the most important geopolitical fact of the 20th century would be that the United States and Britain spoke the same language. Now, the values shared by the United States and India may emerge as the most important geopolitical fact of this century.

Other foreign-policy legacies of the Bush years include the signing of new bilateral trade agreements, the world's first convention on cybercrime, the wise decision to give Hugo Chávez enough rope to hang himself, and the continued successful management of the U.S.-China relationship. Conversely, if Iran is allowed to follow North Korea into the nuclear weapons club, it could well be the failure to act against the other two thirds of the "axis of evil," not the willingness to act in Iraq, that will be regarded as the most important decision of the Bush years.

1234567NEXT