When President Bush took office last January, he and his foreign policy team were determined to be the new Republican broom that sweeps clean. Out with Bill Clinton’s approach to the Middle East and other trouble spots around the world.
What a difference five months can make. That’s how long it took the new administration to realize that when ideology meets reality, reality usually wins.
As President Bush visits Europe this week, opening in Madrid — a bow to the Hispanic community at home, which is, at 36 million strong, or 12 percent of the population, the largest minority in the country — and later on to Poland and finally ending the trip by meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Central European country of Slovenia, he will be doing more than attempting to change the crude image the European have of him as a leader with jejune skills in foreign policy.
He will in fact be saying that his administration has already sharply changed course on a number of foreign policy issues, stepping up US involvement in several volatile regions while seeking to ease the Europeans’ concern about American unilateralism.
Bush, in other words, has seen the light, namely, that global forces are so interconnected today, in a manner similar to subsystems that are dynamically linked to a whole system, that foreign policy is everything — finance, politics, trade, culture — and no leader of a major power can avoid being involved if he wants to see it all come together.
In a way, then, the Bush administration, sooner or later, will find itself edging back to the Clinton era of activist engagement. As James Lindsay of the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post last Sunday: “People who had expected that this administration would come in and rearrange the furniture are going to be disappointed. At the end of the day, this administration will look a lot like its predecessors.”
Radical shifts in foreign policy by the US, a big power that by definition has long-term global interests and alliances do not occur easily. Zbignniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in Jimmy Carter’s White House, once wrote: “In the final analysis, with the foreign policy of a huge power like the United States, the margin for maneuver is like a supertanker or aircraft carrier. It can edge a little to the left, a little to the right. Not much more.”
In areas such as the Middle East, the Bush administration is competing five months in office with positions that increasingly resemble those of the Clinton years, which the president and his foreign policy team had initially dismissed. Early last week, for example, Bush dispatched CIA Director George T. Tenet to initiate “security talks” between Israelis and Palestinians, and Special Assistant to the Middle East William Burns to meet with the leaders of both sides, though State Department spokesman Richard Boucher hastened to warn that the administration will not pursue a policy similar to Clinton’s. We’ll see what difference the next five months will make.
For their part, the Palestinians, who had accepted the Mitchell Report in its entirety, have called for a “summit” to talk about ways of carrying out its recommendations. That, however, sounds like a tall order for now. Having walked away from Camp David and the Clinton Proposals, which offered them a half-decent settlement (a half-decent settlement that this column at the time urged Palestinian leaders to accept), they find, yet again, that statehood, freedom and independence continue to elude them, buried for the time being beyond the horizon.
The Israelis, who meanwhile carry on with their expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land — disguised disingenuously as “natural growth” — do not care what others, including Europeans, think of their practices. They have, after all, the world’s largest superpower on their side, a loyal ally prepared to endorse their arbitrary and capricious policies in Palestine.
While Bush travels in Europe this week, carrying a lot of baggage on his back, including such issues as missile defense and global warming, the one foreign policy issue that he appears to have already made steady progress on with European allies, even before he arrived there, is that of recasting UN sanctions against Iraq. The new Iraq policy, that Bush will pitch in Europe, is known as “smart sanctions,” presumably to distinguish it from its predecessor, the “dumb sanctions,” whose end result was to punish the Iraqi people and reward their leadership.
Known by the official sobriquet “food-for-oil,” the dumb sanctions were meant, in theory, to channel Iraqi oil sales through UN accounts to benefit the Iraqi population. The policy was so flawed, however, that not only did it impede needed imports, but created a network of oil smuggling whose under-the-table revenue went directly to the Iraqi regime — the very regime that the sanctions were meant to hurt in the first place.
The Bush administration worked closely with France and Britain to devise the new sanctions plan, and has been pushing hard to get Russia and China, the other two members of the Security Council, to approve it. Now it is for Bush, when he meets with Putin this week in Slovenia (a country that is a candidate to become NATO’s next member state) to get Russia’s agreement.
A key element of the “smart sanctions” is, well, smart: Creating a “compensation fund” to help Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey, Syria and Jordan, through whose borders the smuggled oil allegedly passes, by disbursing into their treasuries payments amounting to $500 million annually in return for closing their borders to that smuggled oil. The US, backed by France and Britain, has proposed that the money come out of the escrow account held by the UN on behalf of Baghdad.
You have to take your hat off to the Americans, the French and the Brits for this theatrical touch: they want Iraq to pay its neighbors not to smuggle Iraqi oil.
Meanwhile, as Bush visits Europe, we can be sure that American foreign policy, at a seminal level of relating to it, will stay the same. Brzezinski’s metaphor, likening a big power to an aircraft carrier, is true. A tanker that edges a little to the left, then a little to the right, will, at the end of the day, stay in place. And as far as our part of the world is concerned, we have been assured, the White will do its best, more or less. Mostly less.
