My subscription to Foreign Affairs isn’t set up on this computer, so at the moment I can only offer the cover blurb. But here’s a story of thoses someone looking at alternatives. Hopefully they’re better than those I cooked up Sunday morning.
[quote=“Foreign Affairs: Return to Realism”]Reading over President George W. Bush’s March 2006 National Security Strategy, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence that the president has backed away from what has become known as the Bush doctrine. “America is at war,” says the document; we will “fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country” and “support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture,” with the ultimate goal of “ending tyranny in our world.”
[…]
But if the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution itself is over. The question is not whether the president and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine – they do – but whether they can sustain it. They cannot. Although the administration does not like to admit it, U.S. foreign policy is already on a very different trajectory than it was in Bush’s first term. The budgetary, political, and diplomatic realities that the first Bush team tried to ignore have begun to set in.
The reversal of the Bush revolution is a good thing. By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terrorism to overshadow all other national priorities, Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank. Washington now lacks the reservoir of international legitimacy, resources, and domestic support necessary to pursue other key national interests.
It is not too late to put U.S. foreign policy back on a more sustainable course, and Bush has already begun to do so. But these new, mostly positive trends are no less reversible than the old ones were. Another terrorist attack on the United States, a major challenge from Iran, or a fresh burst of misplaced optimism about Iraq could entice the administration to return to its revolutionary course – with potentially disastrous consequences.
THE ACCIDENTAL REVOLUTION
It is no small irony that Bush’s foreign policy ended up on the idealistic end of the U.S. foreign policy spectrum. Contrary to the notion, common on the left and overseas, that the Bush team was hawkish and interventionist from the start, the administration was in fact deeply divided in its first months. If anything, it leaned toward the realist view that the United States should avoid meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations. In his campaign, Bush famously …[/quote] …said that he didn’t think the US should be involved in nation building. Oops. Would have been a good idea to recruit a few fellas who could have done something along those lines in Iraq. Not that it’s working all that well in Afghanistan, where there’s a far more extensive international presence.
Still, what do we have? Bush & Co. still believing in their approach, but pursing other means because acting on their beliefs has clearly failed to acheive their ends. Seems like the perfect conditions in which to begin thinking creatively about alternatives… and not just on the part of those opposed to these policies.
Anyone else want to offer creative alternatives?