Los Angeles Times
October 4, 2004
George W. Bush has campaigned on a foreign policy that is, for the most part,
appropriate and wise. He has said that this country and its leaders should show
"the modesty of true strength [and] the humility of real greatness." We
take issue with his criticism of what he has called "nation-building" because we
believe that American might can and should be used sometimes to promote
democratic values in other countries. But his is a vision of America's role in
the world that would make us happy and proud.
If only we could have it.
For that was Bush's vision in 2000. He has governed very differently. Yes, the
events of Sept. 11 changed much, if not everything. But that doesn't justify
Bush's dramatic flip-flop (to use his favorite criticism of his opponent, John
F. Kerry). Elected leaders should be penalized for saying one thing and doing
another, even if the result isn't disastrous. Bush's foreign policy has been
disastrous.
When Bush and Kerry debated Thursday, they focused so
narrowly on Iraq that they didn't really answer this fundamental question: Is
the U.S. safer than it was four years ago? Even allowing that our country was
less safe four years ago than we realized at the time, the answer is no.
When Bush entered office in January 2001, the United States was not just a
dominant power in the world, it was an unrivaled one. Europe cheered as
U.S.-led airstrikes toppled Slobodan Milosevic's tyranny in the Balkans. China
backed down from threatening Taiwan when President Clinton sent warships into
the region. Around the world, the American model was seen as the only path to
prosperity and freedom.
Now all that is gone. The military is
stretched to the breaking point, with more than 100,000 troops tied down in Iraq
and more than $90 billion having been spent on behalf of a war that was based on
a massive intelligence failure. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been
willfully abandoned by the Bush administration. North Korea and Iran are
constructing nuclear weapons with impunity. Russia is reaching back to its
czarist past as Vladimir V. Putin tightens his grip on power, while Bush utters
feeble pieties about how he will continue to push for democracy and human
rights. Meanwhile, admiration for the U.S. has been replaced by loathing; even
in moderate Turkey, 59% of the population, according to a recent Pew Research
Center poll, believes that suicide bombings are legitimate in Iraq.
The
mischief began even before 9/11. From the start, Bush's credo was
unilateralism. Even as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was on his way to
visit the White House, Bush gratuitously humiliated him by announcing that he
would not sign the Kyoto treaty limiting greenhouse gases. He made it clear
from the start that he would repudiate the antiballistic missile treaty with
Russia, which he did, in order to pursue the chimera of strategic defense. The
taxpayers will spend more than $10 billion next year on this highly doubtful
missile shield.
That same unilateralism has suffu sed the approach to
the war on terrorism, leaving the U.S. to bear the brunt of the war in Iraq and
earning it the odium of the outside world. By simultaneously overextending the
military and running up huge deficits, Bush may have created the kind of
overstretch that has destroyed empires.
But would Kerry offer a more
realistic foreign policy? The former Navy man regained his sea legs, so to
speak, during the debate by proposing, however vaguely, that the U.S. should
begin to think about an exit strategy from Iraq. His other foreign policy
stands are not remarkably different from Bush's.
Kerry's biggest virtue
is what he is not. In contrast to Bush, who seems to be living in a fantasy
land about Iraq, he realizes that the U.S. has to patch up its relations with
Europe, fight nuclear proliferation and make choices about where it can and
cannot exercise power. Sadly, there is also some comfort in the thought that,
like Bush four years ago, Kerry can change his mind. Bush is committed. There
is value in non-incumbency.
There is value in incumbency too. Bush is
now claiming the virtue of experience and knowledge of global leaders (he reeled
them off in Thursday's debate). His experience might count for more if it
hadn't been our experience as well.
One aspect of Bush's incumbency
deserves special comment. In the debate and elsewhere, he has repeated a Kerry
line about Iraq being the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, and
has declared that this and similar criticisms of his policy disqualify Kerry as
president because they send a bad message to, variously, U.S. troops, citizens
or allies.
The message Kerry's criticisms send is that, even in
wartime, the United States is a democracy. The message Bush sends is that he
need not defend his stewardship because criticism is invalid, whatever its
merits. L'etat, c'est moi, as one of those French fellas put it. So
much for the modesty of true strength and the humility of real greatness.