Experience is about the past. It isn’t always the best guide when times and circumstances change. No leader has been more experienced than Napoleon Bonaparte when he embarked on the devastating folly of his Russian invasion in 1812, or when he sent his troops to ignominious defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
The Bush Administration‘s record in foreign policy is Waterloo dozens of times over, eight years of serial disaster. With huge Republican majorities in Congress for six of those years and broad support from the public through most of its two terms, the Administration exhausted its political and moral capital on the most dismal string of failures abroad in U.S. history.
Yet its chief policy-makers – Vice-President Richard Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disgraced former World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz – were among the most experienced overseas hands in Washington.
The presumed Republican candidate for President, John McCain, not only backed all of the failed Bush overseas initiatives. He is committed to maintaining their most catastrophic principles, including the heedless use of force rather than careful diplomacy, and a belligerent unilateralism that has left the United States profoundly isolated in the world arena.
A vote for McCain, in foreign-affairs terms, is a vote of confidence for policies that have brought the United States to its lowest level of international respect since Washington first assumed a global role at the end of the 19th century.
FREE FALL
Even when viewed from the political right, the Administration’s performance is the subject of fierce recrimination. “George Bush’s foreign policy is in free fall,†ex-ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, a leading neoconservative, told the German weekly Der Spiegel in December.
A concise summary of that free-fall makes for appalling reading:
In 2001, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, where American troops are helplessly bogged down seven years later – almost twice as long as the successful campaign against Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. The net effect, after thousands of casualties, most of them civilian, is a Washington-installed government in Kabul that controls the capital and not much else, and an Afghan economy that plays a central role in the global illicit drug trade.
After five nightmarish years of conflict in Iraq, with the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and an estimated 94,000 Iraqis, the number one priority of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is to get the United States out his country as soon as possible. At home, the U.S. economy has been driven into recession by the war’s officially reported $650 billion cost so far – some estimates put the eventual cost at $2.7 trillion – while sky-high oil prices have provided Iraq with a $79 billion surplus, little of which appears to have been budgeted for national reconstruction.
Moderate Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, who actively sought a rapprochement with the West, was fatally undermined in 2002 when he was consigned to the Bush Administration’s “Axis of Evil,†along with North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
The result? Khatami was succeeded by hardline Islamist and virulent anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now regarded in Baghdad as a close and valued ally. Iran looks likely to play a decisive future role in the development of Iraqi oil fields, which boast the third largest reserves on the planet after those of Saudi Arabia and Iran itself.
Pakistan, ostensibly a key partner to Washington in the struggle against international terrorism, has unceremoniously booted out President Pervez Musharraf, the partnership’s guarantor, leaving the United States with virtually no leverage in a country widely regarded as the main source of arms for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the operations base of their clandestine leadership.
Across the Islamic world, public opinion surveys routinely find that overwhelming majorities see the United States as their arch-enemy, at war not with terrorism but with Islam.
It would almost be reassuring if the damage was limited to the entrenched problems of Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But it would also be wishful thinking.
THE WIDER WORLD
In the former Soviet Union, U.S. policies that veered erratically between dismissive contempt for Moscow to naïve confidence in its strongman, Vladimir Putin, have climaxed in the utter humiliation of American aims in the oil-rich Caucasus. The Russian invasion of Georgia in early August raised the curtain on an updated version of the Cold War, but with Putin holding an all-important trump card.
Moscow now controls all of the pipelines carrying Caspian Basin oil to the West, as well as the most important natural gas conduits to Western Europe.
Kim Jong-il remains in power in North Korea, taunting Washington one day and offering to disable his nuclear facilities the next. Administration spokespersons were still portraying U.S. diplomatic efforts there as a modest success until last Tuesday (August 26) – when North Korea once again halted disabling procedures, and announced that it planned to resume work toward the production of nuclear weapons.
The State Department lamely described the announcement as a “step backward.†In any case, whatever hope there is for real change in North Korean behavior is universally thought to rest on pressure from Beijing, rather than Washington.
No progress whatsoever has been made in U.S. efforts to confront the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, the political crisis in Zimbabwe, the rise to power of extremist factions in Palestine and Lebanon, or the continued spread of illegal and highly destabilising Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
When Secretary of State Rice arrived in Jerusalem this week on a diplomatic junket, she was was visibly shaken by new figures showing that Israel has nearly doubled settlement construction on the West bank, blithely ignoring its promises in American-backed peace talks.
Throughout much of Latin America, the left has been returned to power in elections flavored by vehement anti-Americanism and enthusiastic approval of its loudest proponent, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
Only in its waning months has the Bush Administration begun to shed its open derision for America’s longstanding European allies, after coming perilously close to destroying the Atlantic Alliance, the essential keystone of geopolitics for 60 years.
The Bush administration “has alienated our friends, damaged our credibility around the world, reduced our influence to an all-time low in my lifetime, given hope to our enemies,” former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Tony McPeak said four years ago.
Since then, the damage has grown immeasurably worse: continuing revelations that U.S. motives in Iraq were clouded by falsified “evidence,†the endless saga of abuses at Guantanamo, fall-out from the casual junking of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.
“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century,” President Bush said, in reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia.
It is a pity, a terrible tragedy – for America, for the world – that the Bush Administration didn’t heed that lesson in its own conduct of foreign policy.
“EXPERIENCE†REDEFINED
By any measure, a dramatic change in course is necessary. And there is no reason to suppose that it will come from the Republicans or their likely candidate in the November 4 election. That would require both John McCain and his party to run against their own record.
More to the point, the party that blindly dragged the U.S. image into the global gutter cannot be expected to refurbish it. And there will be no improvement of the nation’s standing in specific crises – in the Far East, Europe and Latin America, as much as in the Islamic countries – if foreign leaders and ordinary people aren’t convinced that a new and promising page has been turned.
This is why the election of a 72-year-old conservative Republican hawk like John McCain cannot make a difference abroad, and the arrival of a younger generation in the White House can at least offer hope. A McCain victory would be seen almost everywhere as an endorsement of belligerent unilateralism, from a self-defeating United States in deep denial.
Barack Obama is, in the formal sense, relatively inexperienced in global affairs, although he is a seasoned veteran by comparison with George W. Bush in 2000. His running mate, Joseph Biden, remedies the formal shortcoming with three decades of intense involvement in foreign affairs as a senator.
But what matters far more is the informal: actual day-to-day living experience beyond America’s shores, and an instinctive understanding of the prudence, calm reasoning – and reliance on sound, objective intelligence – required to meet crises in a world that grows smaller and more interdependent with each passing day.
Obama, by this yardstick, is a man of long and extraordinary experience, a man for global times.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5