Guantánamo is still open, U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan, U.S. drones still aim for al Qaeda targets every week, and more than 1,200 government agencies work on counterterrorism. Like it or not, we're still living in George W. Bush's America. And at a time when most politicians, including the GOP presidential candidates, are advocating a more limited U.S. role in the world, Bush's vice president and secretary of state have remained unapologetic public advocates for the projection of American power -- even if they vehemently disagree about how to exercise it.
This year, in dueling memoirs, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice offered a new look at the still-relevant foreign-policy divides of the Bush administration. Cheney's In My Time is a passionate defense of his aggressive approach to the war on terror. It also takes a few shots at Rice, accusing her of misleading Bush about details of North Korea negotiations and of "tearfully" admitting she was wrong about the media strategy for the Iraq war. Rice's memoir, No Higher Honor, in which she calls the vice president's staff "very much of one ultra-hawkish mind," describes not only her conflicts with Cheney -- most notably when she lost the fight to avoid having terrorism suspects "disappeared" -- but also the shift to a more engaged foreign policy that marked Bush's second term. In those years, Rice did much to build an approach to the world that Barack Obama -- who campaigned in 2008 as Bush's polar opposite -- has arguably embraced.
RICE
Muse Courage.
Stimulus or austerity? I'm not a Keynesian. So I don't mind stimulus if it really is stimulating the economy, but I tend to believe that what really happens with stimulus is that you end up spending money on things that are not necessarily stimulative of the economy.
America or China? America, hands down.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Arab Spring. Complicated and messy, but far better than the silence of tyranny.
Reading list The Confession, by John Grisham; Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson; King's Cross, by Timothy Keller.
Best idea Technology is transforming the way we live every day. But it isn't the cause of that transformation; it's just accelerating everything. We're living in a faster and faster world.
Worst idea That the United States of America should sit on the sidelines in global leadership.
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