U.S. Foreign Policy Assertive, Divisive

When George W. Bush arrived at the White House in January 2001, his foreign policy goals appeared modest. The main international plank of Bush’s presidential campaign was a promise to restrain U.S. military intervention in conflicts overseas, not expand it.

But 19 months and one terrorist attack later, Bush’s response to the challenge of Al Qaeda has expanded into an ambitious and controversial vision for a more assertive foreign policy on a global scale.

Already being called the “Bush Doctrine,” the new policy--to be outlined formally in a report to Congress this fall--declares the United States ready to launch preemptive attacks on hostile countries that deploy nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, with Iraq the most likely target.

Equally important, Bush aides say his “National Security Strategy” report will range far beyond Iraq to chart a broad global role for the United States, including calls for more cooperation with Russia and China, more military aid to countries battling terrorists, and more economic aid to poor nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Not surprisingly, the call for military strikes against Iraq has become a lightning rod for controversy. But the administration’s broader argument--that the fight against terrorism provides the core of a new U.S. strategy for what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell calls the “post-post-Cold War era”--has also sparked debate.

Some are ready to applaud. “It’s a pretty sweeping set of ideas, but I think it’s feasible,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a foreign policy scholar at Yale University. “There’s a degree of coherence that we haven’t seen for a long time. You didn’t see it in the previous administration, and you didn’t see it in the first months of this administration.”

Others are less enthusiastic, warning that the new policy, far from sparking cooperation with other great powers, is causing unnecessary friction.

“I don’t think it works,” said John J. Mearsheimer, a theorist of international relations at the University of Chicago. “Their point that dealing with terrorism becomes the focus of foreign policy for all the great powers, I don’t believe that. It’s not the focus for Russia; it’s not the focus for China. Even the Europeans think we’re obsessed.”

But most analysts agree that the new doctrine reflects a major shift in thinking for a president who came to office with only a few foreign policy ambitions--mainly to reduce U.S. peacekeeping commitments abroad and deploy anti-missile defenses at home.

What changed Bush’s focus? The terrorist attack of Sept. 11.

Sept. 11 was “an earthquake,” said Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, in an interview. “It was such an earthquake that it began almost immediately to move things around--to the point that you could say there are new dangers here, but there are also some new opportunities.”

Among the opportunities, she said, is the hope that the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan can find common ground in a joint struggle against terrorism. “For the first time in international history, it’s probable that you won’t have great power rivalry--and that’s a big deal,” she said.

On that front, though, the results have been mixed.

Last fall, when the issue was the threat of terrorism from Al Qaeda, other nations quickly rallied to the U.S. side. Rice recalled that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told Bush at one meeting: “You understand that you cannot afford to lose--because if you lose, we’re all done for.”

But more recently, as Bush has expanded his doctrine to focus on hostile countries with weapons of mass destruction--in his words, the “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea--the only ally to offer open support has been Britain’s Tony Blair.

Asked why there hasn’t been more public support from other countries, an official replied almost testily: “Because nobody’s been asked.”

Even within the administration there has been division over exactly what the Bush Doctrine requires. Aides say there is a consensus that the combination of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction poses a clear and present danger, and that overthrowing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein must be a U.S. goal. But how to get there, and how fast, is still being debated.

Bush gave a preview of the strategy at West Point’s graduation ceremony in June, when he argued that countries such as Iraq are too dangerous to be “contained.”

“Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend,” the president argued. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”

As a result, Bush said, Americans must “be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”

That warning grabbed the next morning’s headlines. But the West Point speech also included two more subtle arguments that are also part of the Bush Doctrine.

One was that conflict among the world’s great powers may now be over--but that the best way to keep the peace is for the United States to maintain “military strength beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless.”

The second was that the world does not face a “clash of civilizations,” but a struggle by all nations to implement common values--which Bush listed as “limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.” The United States, Bush said, should help them get there.

All of which, Gaddis and other scholars agree, adds up to the framework of an updated global strategy for the United States--even, perhaps, a “Bush Doctrine.”

“A doctrine is more than just a policy,” Gaddis said. “A doctrine normally results from a major crisis. It implies a reversal of thinking; it reflects new geopolitical realities.... This probably qualifies.”

To foreign policy analysts, the most intriguing part of the Bush Doctrine isn’t the administration’s saber-rattling at Iraq.

Instead, the most interesting parts are Bush’s broader arguments that the threat to peace no longer comes from great-power conflict but from smaller powers such as Iraq; that deterrence and containment cannot work against such countries; and that the long-term solution must include U.S. promotion of democracy and other American values.

“It’s a Pax Americana, but Pax Americana in cooperation with other great powers,” Gaddis said.

Added Loren D. Thompson Jr. of the Lexington Institute, “The doctrine represents the convergence of two forces: first, the sense of danger and urgency that followed Sept. 11, and, second, the distrust of deterrence in the right wing of the Republican Party.”

The first hurdle the administration faces is persuading U.S. allies and the American public that deterrence won’t work against Hussein, and that removing him from power is truly necessary, even if it means going to war.

Bush and his aides have argued that Hussein must go because he might give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. But others, including Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advisor to the first President Bush, have questioned that logic. “[Hussein] is unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction ... by handing such weapons to terrorists who would use them for their own purposes and leave Baghdad as the return address,” Scowcroft wrote.

A second problem: Bush wants to maintain a broad international coalition against terrorism and to strengthen cooperation with other big powers, including Russia and China. But in his campaign against Iraq and other countries in the “axis of evil,” Bush has shown little inclination to seek much advice from other countries, drawing complaints from such traditional allies as Britain, France and Germany.

“Much of what they’ve enunciated as global strategy has a unilateral flavor to it,” said Thompson, who largely supports the administration approach. “Bush’s speech [on preemptive action] at West Point was an appeal to unilateral morality.... Iraq hasn’t attacked us; nor has North Korea or Iran.”

“The Clinton administration used velvet gloves ... when dealing with the Europeans,” Mearsheimer said. “The Bush administration seems to relish using the iron fist without the velvet gloves.”

Moreover, Mearsheimer argued, it simply isn’t clear yet that the war on terrorism is important enough to Russia and China to turn them into lasting allies of the United States.

“The war on terrorism hasn’t fundamentally altered relations among the great powers,” he said. “It doesn’t preclude serious security competition between the U.S. and China, for example.”

Rice disagrees. “Fundamentals like that don’t change overnight,” she said. “But the level of [current] cooperation with China is unparalleled. There’s no question that our relationship with Russia is broader and deeper as a direct result of cooperation on terrorism. So, for a few months’ work, not bad.”

But over the long run, the test of the Bush Doctrine is whether it becomes the core for a global strategy that lasts--like Harry S. Truman’s doctrine of containment, which stood for half a century as the basis of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union--or merely a temporary preoccupation.

“When you get down to it, Iraq may really be the only case,” suggested Terry Deibel, a professor at the National War College. “If that’s so, it isn’t much of a doctrine. In terms of looking at foreign policy across the board, it doesn’t help you all that much.”

Said Thompson: “The Truman Doctrine grew as it was applied. This doctrine is still a newborn. It could diminish if the threat [of terrorism] is a passing peculiarity....

“People may look on this as a turning point in history or they may look on it as a passing distraction. We don’t know yet.”