The Bush Doctrine in the second term

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay thinks that reality might have forced an unwilling and "faith-based" Bush administration to adjust his second-term foreign policy to something taking more account of the realities of the world: Bush's Foreign-Policy Strategy: Is the Revolution Over? San Jose Mercury News 10/14/05.

They detect a less belligerent tone toward the democratic countries of Europe:

Foreign policy in Bush's second term looks kinder and gentler. The president has visited Europe four times this year in a bid "to remind people that the world is better off, America is better off, Europe is better off, when we work together." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured the Senate during her confirmation hearings that "the time for diplomacy is now."

And they see hopeful signs in the administration's seemingly more pragmatic approach to nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea.

But they don't think any new intellectual considerations in the sense of rethinking their general approach is responsible.  Instead, they argue, "the differences in the second term have less to do with personal epiphanies than with confronting the consequences of decisions made during the first term."

The most troubling of those consequences, of course, is the Iraq War.

Iraqis remain deeply divided over the fundamental questions of how power and resources will be shared, so the insurgency that has already claimed so many Iraqi and American lives is bound to continue unabated.

The truth is that the Bush revolution that reached its apex with the U.S. invasion of Iraq almost surely also ended there.

They go on to review the major assumptions behind the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and unilateralism based on military power.  And they explain how those assumptions came crashing up against reality in their grand Mesopotamian adventure, although it took the administration's true believers a while to understand what they were experiencing - at least to the point of recognizing that they had left themselves drastically reduced options in other parts of the world:

The administration's decision to scuttle the Kyoto Protocol and other international agreements upon first coming to office reflected those theories. But Iraq is where those beliefs would get their biggest test.

Even when it became obvious that most of the world - angered by our dismissiveness of their interests and concerns - wouldn't follow us into Iraq, the president pushed on in the belief that his opponents would eventually rally to his side. And if they did not, he reasoned, it wouldn't matter. "At some point, we may be the only ones left," the president told then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. "That's OK with me. We are America."

By the start of Bush's second term, America did, in many ways, stand alone. In France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, fewer than half of those polled viewed the United States favorably. And in much of the Muslim world, Osama bin Laden was viewed far more favorably than Bush.

They don't believe that the change is due to any particular virtues of the new Secretary of State:

Many credit Rice and her new staff at the State Department for changing the administration's foreign policy, and especially for the deal with North Korea. It is true that she has helped State regain influence it lost under Powell. But the general orientation of Bush's national-security team changed little from the first term to the second. Rice is to the right of Powell. And no one suggests that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or, most important, Bush, has changed his worldview.

They point to the nomination of the hardline nationalist John Bolton as ambassador to the UN as evidence that the administration hasn't given up the Bush Doctrine view of the world and of America's role in it.  In fact, they believe that they would like to revert to the first-term approach: "Veteran Washington hands know that changing the tone of a policy often can salvage its substance."  And they add:

[W]e also are unlikely to see the president pursue the more cooperative, ally-friendly foreign policy that his critics would prefer. That would require the kind of investment of time and effort in detailed negotiations - as well as a willingness to compromise - that he has not been willing to undertake.

But their arrogance, incompetence, corruption and failures have boxed them in domestically as well as internationally:

When the final assessment of the Bush presidency is written, it may well be said that the Bush revolution in foreign policy was brought to a halt by two women - Cindy (Sheehan) and Katrina. Perhaps galvanized by Sheehan's protest in August, more than half the American public now believes that the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq. Moreover, in an ominous sign for the White House, approval for Bush's handling of the campaign against terrorism has dipped below 50 percent for the first time. ...

This, clearly, is not the time for grand foreign-policy initiatives of the kind that marked Bush's first term. Then, Bush could flex America's muscles overseas and ignore reactions in allied capitals because the American people were squarely behind him. Now they are wondering where his policies are taking them.

For a tribute to Ivo Daalder's foreign-policy expertise, see Institutional Suicide at Brookings? Talbott Shuns Ivo Daalder - Hires Unknown Carlos Pasqual by Steve Clemons, TPM Cafe 11/25/05.