Passing the Buck

Burned by his bitter Iraq experience, Bush is eschewing leadership and hiding behind the skirts of multilateral
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

July 12, 2006 - Good foreign policy should be metronomic in pace—measured, steady, dependable. That's especially true when you're the world's only superpower, and you want to keep things that way. The key is to inspire respect, trust and faith in your judgement. That’s called leadership. But for six years now, George W. Bush's foreign policy has resembled a pendulum swinging out of control, lurching wildly from hubris to "help us." Despite the "stay the course" rhetoric, there's been little that is steady or dependable about it, and not surprisingly it has inspired little respect or trust around the world. In Bush's first term, the pendulum swung too far toward in-your-face unilateralism. Now, in his second term it has swung dramatically back toward the most squeamish sort of multilateralism—the kind of thinking that says, "Without partners, I don't dare make a move."

We probably don't have to rehash the problem with too much unilateralism, the subject of a Time magazine cover story this week, called "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy." The article arrives at a conclusion that most sentient beings reached long ago: the old Bush doctrine, involving preemptive strikes against rogue regimes, is over and done with, and so is the policy of acting without caring what the rest of the world thinks. But for the better part of Bush's second term—the last year and a half, in other words—the problem has been the opposite one. The issue now is not the unilateralism of yesterday, but the multilateralism of today. To wit: there's simply too much of it. And without decisive American action in dealing with the Mideast, Iran and North Korea, things can quickly spin out of control.

Nothing brought this home more than Bush's performance at his news conference last week when he sounded utterly chastened by his Iraq experience. From fire-eater in the first term, a man who once confidently said he would "not wait on events while dangers gather," Bush has become someone who seems afraid of making a mistake in his second. When asked about North Korea's missile tests, which Bush had specifically warned Kim Jong Il not to carry out, the president simply deferred to multilateral talks led by China. "What I'm not going to let us do is get caught in the trap of sitting at the table alone with the North Koreans," the president said. If he did, he suggested, then Pyongyang might blame Washington if the talks broke down. "Sometimes it's easier for the leader of the nontransparent society to turn the tables and make a country like the United States the problem," Bush said, as if anticipating the blows he would receive in the world's media from the diminutive Kim Jong Il. So lost is U.S. policy on North Korea today that even Japan, our most peace-loving ally, is talking about developing a pre-emptive-strike capability to take out Pyongyang's missile sites.

On Iran, too, Bush is deferring to the Russians and Europeans to lead the talks. It seems he has learned all too well the lessons that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recited to him about the mistake of going it alone in Iraq. But now he's going too far in the other direction. As a result, things are blowing up so quickly it's difficult to know where to focus any longer. After the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah in Lebanon on Wednesday, which the hard-line group linked to a similar kidnapping by Hamas the week before, the Mideast seemed to be closer to all-out war. One reason has to do with Bush's first-term democracy campaign, which looked so promising a year and a half ago, especially in the Lebanon of the "Cedar Revolution." The upshot is that Israel is now warring against or about to go to war against two groups that were once mere terror organizations, Hamas and Hizbullah, but are now part of elected governments. If Israel does indeed hold the Lebanese government responsible for Wednesday's incident—as it has Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah for the acts of various Hamas factions in Gaza—then we could see a regional war with Iran and Syria drawn in rather than the isolated actions against terrorists that we saw in the past.

The situation cries out for decisive U.S. intervention, at the very least a high-profile American envoy. There is none, and as Sen. Jack Reed told me earlier today: "The administration has been deliberately disengaged in terms of providing a broker." Instead, Bush has either quietly underwritten Israel's efforts to isolate and starve Hamas, or he has deferred Mideast matters to the multilateral Quartet, consisting of the European Union, the United States, the United Nations and Russia.

The lesson here is that America still has to lead like a superpower. And when it comes to dealing with the Mideast, or with Iran and North Korea—the last two members of the "axis of evil"—America isn't leading, it is following. Burned by his bitter Iraq experience, Bush is hiding behind the skirts of multilateralism as an excuse for not grappling with these problems personally. In all three cases, that might mean negotiating directly with regimes he abhors: Tehran, Pyongyang and the Hamas-run government in the Palestinian territories. It would mean a bit more cowboy diplomacy, taking the bull by the horns, as it were, and finding a way out on his own, like Gary Cooper in "High Noon." Instead, Bush is pretending he's not at home when the bad guys get off the train. By all means, rely on multilateral pressures. But at least get involved.

This avoidance of leadership will get him nowhere. In all these cases Bush is leaving the lead negotiating spot to countries that are incapable of forcing a solution or are unwilling to do so. In Asia, China fears a collapsed North Korea on its border far more than it fears a nuclear-armed one. Beijing is not going to join U.S. efforts to close the noose on Kim's regime. When it comes to Iran, Russia is now in the driver's seat in forcing Tehran to accept an American-European package of incentives in return for the mullahs giving up their uranium enrichment program. But Moscow, too, has its own agenda, and Iran is not high on it. Expect to hear hints of compliance on Iran through the G8 summit being hosted by Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg this weekend—and then a resumption of the Kremlin's old balkiness. It is the worst kind of wishful thinking to hope that Russia, like China, is going to play the tough guy with these countries.

Why is our famously straight-talking president now beating around the bush? One problem, of course, is that the never-abating violence in Iraq is drawing all the strength and energy out of U.S. efforts elsewhere. But the main reason, in my view, is ideological paralysis. The president is still taking the same posture of his first term, that of a strong and dominant leader who does not deign to deal with "illegitimate" regimes such as Iran and North Korea, when he no longer has the power to do so. Unlike dealing with Iraq and Al Qaeda, when he had his options wide open, he really doesn't want to attack either Iran or North Korea—both options would be very, very messy. And at the same time he no longer has the moral authority of the shock-and-awe era when America looked almighty. Iraq has exposed America's vulnerabilities, and there's no point in denying it.

But neither is Bush helpless. Though his Army is drained, he still has the world's mightiest Air Force and Navy and the most advanced economy. He needs to see himself as a professional athlete who doesn't have his "A" game but still scrambles to win. Bush is weakened and drained by Iraq but not to the point of total ineffectiveness. Both Iran and North Korea have signaled boldly in recent months that they would be willing to deal with a United States that is willing to sit down with them. A frank reckoning with his diminished state should tell Bush that he still has considerable leverage, but not so much that he can afford to remain on his Olympian perch. It's time to get down and scrabble in the diplomatic dirt.

And with a little less multilateralism, and a little more cowboy diplomacy (not too much pendulum-swinging, mind you), Bush has a real chance to snatch back America's tarnished reputation. There are a number of reasons why Iran and North Korea are building weapons of mass destruction. But fear of what America might do must rank high among them. "[Iran's leaders] are obsessed by the Americans, really obsessed," an Iraqi official who visited Tehran last fall told my colleague Scott Johnson. Kim Jong Il also has shown over the years that a U.S. attack is his primary fear. And while he has cheated on previous agreements, he's shown a willingness to negotiate away his arms, for example with a 1999 moratorium on missile tests. A North Korea deal would instantly return to Bush the trophy that the Chinese have been coveting: that of the leading power in Asia. A broad security pact with Iran—a much harder prize now with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power than it was a few years ago when Bush rejected an overture from a more moderate Tehran—is going to be brutally difficult, but it's not impossible either. And it would be a diplomatic achievement on par with Jimmy Carter's Camp David agreement.

Set aside for the moment the precipitous invasion of Iraq. America is still the stabilizer of the international system; American power is the global control rod that stifles belligerents and arms races from East Asia to Latin America, making globalization possible in the first place. With the exception of Iraq, this hidden infrastructure of U.S. power emerges into public view only occasionally, in tsunami relief or in America's unique ability to supply airlift and logistical support to various hotspots from East Timor to Sudan. Since 9/11, U.S. Special Forces have been increasingly operating as global SWAT teams, slipping silently across borders to take out terror cells—systematically, if sometimes savagely, clearing the mean back alleys of the global village (controversial, yes, but most governments don't seem to mind).

Despite the legitimacy and trust he has squandered by the boatload, Bush needs to remember this is still America's position in the world. In a moment of eloquence at his news conference last week, Bush reminded many people why they voted for him in the first place. " I happen to believe that when you say something, you better mean it," Bush said. "That's one way you keep the peace: you speak clearly, and you mean what you say." He now needs to prove that he meant what he said about Iran, North Korea and Mideast democracy.