WASHINGTON, 8 November 2003 — The name is Bush but the philosophy was pure Reagan.
President Bush Thursday explained his approach to the Middle East by drawing a comparison to President Reagan’s stance 20 years ago in the Cold War. “A number of critics were dismissive’’ of Reagan’s idealistic belief in the superiority of liberty as both a moral right and as a way of organizing society, Bush said. Reagan lashed his foreign policy to the unproven faith that “freedom had a momentum that would not be halted,’’ as Bush put it — and ignored people who called him “simplistic and naive, and even dangerous.’’ Bush believes Reagan was “entirely correct,’’ and that what worked in the 1980s against the Soviet empire will work again in the Middle East. Reagan’s critics are now his critics, Bush suggested, and Reagan proved them wrong.
But not even Reagan dared press Reaganism this far. Operating in the superpower standoff of the Cold War, Reagan did not risk pushing the closed and autocratic governments of the Middle East to embrace human liberty. Rather, he pursued essentially the same Middle East strategy that his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, had embraced, favoring stability over modernization and an unpleasant status quo over a very risky gamble on progress.
“Even Reagan himself implicitly fenced off the Middle East,’’ said one administration official.
Bush’s speech at the National Endowment for Democracy was long and highly rhetorical. He announced a break with “60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East,’’ a policy that “did nothing to make us safe.’’ Instead, the US will pursue “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.’’
What this means in practical terms — beyond the obvious in Iraq — was left unsaid.
But as rhetoric, the speech was Reaganism distilled, the 150-proof stuff, and revealed the extent to which ideas that were being batted around on a lonely fringe of politics 40 years ago have become the governing worldview of the global hyperpower. In the age-old foreign policy struggle between sunny idealism and ice-cold cunning, the idealists are at the controls — surprising, perhaps, given that Bush’s father leaned, by training and temperament, in the other direction. “He’s a Reaganite,’’ said former Rep. Vin Weber, who introduced Bush at Thursday’s speech. “Bush operates from the ... very strong belief that ideas rule the world.’’ That belief comes not from “41,’’ as the elder President Bush is known in the family. It comes from 40.
“I came to Congress the year Reagan was elected president,’’ Weber continued, “and that’s what I remember about Ronald Reagan: He was a person who surrounded himself with men who believe in ideas, and he had an unshakable confidence that those ideas would prevail.’’
Reagan and his British soulmate, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, have talked about the political loneliness of free-market optimists post-World War II. Both drew sustenance from the writings of an Austrian economist and philosopher named Friedrich von Hayek, who maintained that freedom — to own property, to think and speak freely, to live under the rule of law — was essential to economic progress. Centrally controlled states could not compete over the long term with free markets, Hayek taught. Both leaders applied this theory first inside their own conservative movements. Once, during the 1970s, Thatcher slammed a copy of Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty’’ onto a table at a Conservative Party conference and declared, “This is what we believe.’’ Upon gaining power, she and Reagan worked to free up markets in their own countries. And they hinged their foreign policy on the idea that the Cold War need not end in stalemate — it could be won, using the lever of liberty. Even within the Republican Party, they were many skeptics.
“Remember,’’ Weber said, “there was a big debate inside the Republican Party over realpolitik versus some more idealistic approach to foreign policy. Richard Nixon was the ultimate practitioner of hardheaded tactics, and his presidency was, at that time, just a few years in the past.’’
Bush grounded his speech in that same philosophy. It is “an extraordinary, undeniable fact,’’ he said, that “over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker.’’ In the picture Bush painted, however, the conflict between the idealist approach and the pragmatic approach simply disappeared. To him, the tactical imperative — security in an age of terror — demands an idealistic approach. “In the long run,’’ he said, “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of economic stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.’’
Not everyone was convinced by Bush’s philosophical purity, however. Even among his fellow conservatives, there were questions about some of the things he said, or left unsaid.
Some questioned Bush’s assertion that there are no cultural or religious impediments to democracy in the Middle East, only “political and economic’’ ones.
“I suspect that tends to underestimate the pain of transformation, the extent to which religion and culture will have to be overcome in order to adapt to liberal and democratic ways,’’ said Peter Berkowitz, a political and legal philosopher who has examined the US-supported effort to liberalize tiny Kuwait.
Other critics of the speech noted that Bush chose not to talk about the still-uncertain fate of liberty even in Reagan’s defeated “evil empire.’’ In recent days, Russian President Vladimir Putin has jailed one of the country’s leading capitalists and seized control of his oil empire — all without provoking action from the Bush administration. Michael McFaul, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, called on Bush to put more action behind his rhetoric.
“It was one of the boldest, clearest statements on the promotion of liberty ever made by an American president,’’ McFaul said of Bush’s speech. “I now hope to see policy follow the rhetoric. On Russia, it most certainly does not.’’
And like Reagan before him, Bush was faulted for saying one thing and doing another — extolling liberty while cooperating in the war on terror with despots and autocrats throughout the Middle East and Asia.
Ultimately, the only test of an idea is time. Bush promised that his gamble in Iraq will prove to be “a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.’’ The proof is yet to come.
“Victory vindicates and defeat indicts,’’ said one White House strategist. “And we’re not going to know for a long time.’’
