Obama Abroad Mirrors Bush Senior

[question everything]

DECEMBER 8, 2009

Obama Abroad Mirrors Bush Senior

By GERALD F. SEIB
WSJ


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Slowly but surely, Mr. Obama is molding a foreign policy that harkens back more to the President Bush who managed the end of the Cold War than to his son, the President Bush who managed the aftermath of a deadly terrorist strike on the U.S. For the elder President Bush, the hallmarks of foreign policy were a preference for pragmatism and stability over idealism and risk; an emphasis on multilateralism over unilateralism; and a willingness to work with leaders the world provides rather than the ones America might prefer. Many of those hallmarks can be seen in President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama's announcement had none of the lofty rhetoric about spreading democracy or transforming Afghanistan that might have come from the younger President Bush. Instead, the emphasis was on stabilizing Afghanistan rather than really fixing it -- a less-idealistic approach that might have been expected of Bush the elder.

There also was heavy emphasis on making the Afghan surge international rather than unilateral -- hence, the hard push for allies to simultaneously add to their troop levels -- another hallmark of the first Bush's approach. And there was a quick-in, quick-out, limited-goals formula to his Afghanistan strategy. That mirrors the first President Bush's decision to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991 and stop the operation there, rather than moving on to Baghdad to oust Saddam Hussein. It's striking that while Mr. Obama is often criticized for an overemphasis on soaring rhetoric and an excess of ambition in his domestic agenda, his Afghanistan announcement was marked by the opposite -- also mirroring foreign-policy pronouncements by the elder President Bush.

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"The emphasis on foreign policy is once again about foreign policy rather than transformation," says Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who worked for both Bush administrations. It was no accident that Mr. Obama said during last year's campaign that he admired the elder President Bush's approach to foreign affairs, even as he roundly criticized that of his son. It's common to view the elder Bush's approach to foreign policy through the lens of the first Persian Gulf War, yet the better way to see his approach is to recall his masterful handling of the decline and fall of the Soviet empire. On that front, the Bush emphasis was consistently on stability amid change rather than speed in change, and a calculation that the risks of reaching too far to bring down the Soviets outstripped the risks of not reaching far enough.

Thus, the first President Bush maintained his loyalty to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev long after critics clamored for him to shift it to the rambunctious, self-proclaimed Russian reformer Boris Yeltsin. In a profoundly dangerous situation, he preferred dealing as long as possible with the stable, known leader rather than the less stable, virtually unknown rebel. The elder President Bush also took great pains to work with allies to ensure that the strategy for ending the Soviet Union and reunifying Germany was a united Western one. He operated in virtually nonstop consultation with, in particular, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

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President Obama hasn't adopted the elder Bush's approach in its entirety, of course. When the first Bush administration decided to go to war against Iraqi forces in Kuwait, it did so with overwhelming force, which is hardly the approach the current president has chosen in Afghanistan. And to some extent, the current economic weakness of America may simply demand a less ambitious approach than George W. Bush attempted. It's harder to confront China on human rights, for instance, when relying on Beijing to finance America's ballooning debt, or to face down Iran alone when the U.S. military is stretched thin. The elder Bush's approach may have been a matter of prudence, while Mr. Obama's may be rooted more in necessity.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126022662158280919.htm (subscription)

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A2