The Legacy of George W. Bush's Foreign Policy

Moving beyond Neoconservatism

Ilan Peleg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume incisively analyzes the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Examining the legacy of the forty-third President, author Ilan Peleg explains the complex factors underlying the Bush Doctrine: neoconservative ideology, real and perceived challenges to US world supremacy, Bush's personality, the White House's unique decision-making process, and the impact of September 11. Peleg argues that in its shift from deterrence and containment to prevention and preemption, from multilateral leadership to unilateral militarism, and from consensual realism to radical neoconservatism, the Bush administration has effected a true revolution in the foundational goals, as well as in the means, of US foreign policy. Peleg also offers a series of judicious recommendations for future administrations, including the reestablishment of a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, increased emphasis on multilateralism, the demilitarization of US foreign policy, renewed focus on the resolution of serious regional conflicts, and more realistic expectations about noncoerced democratization around the world.

CHAPTER 1

THE BUSH LEGACY

Controversial Policy and Uncertain Future

The purpose of this introductory chapter, written during the last months of the administration of George W. Bush, is dual. The first goal is to present a general thesis in regard to the foreign policy of the forty-third president of the United States, its consequences, and its implications for the future of America and the world; this thesis is explored in full detail throughout the volume. The second goal here is to briefly describe the structure of the volume as a whole and that of each of its six individual chapters to facilitate a relatively easy, painless reading for experts and laymen alike.

The past eight years of American foreign policy were among the most dramatic, rocky, and consequential in decades. It was a period that defied simple, univariate, reductionist explanations. A unique and complex combination of factors shaped American foreign policy. Among them, five are of particular importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, the foreign policy decision-making process established by his administration, the impact of the extremely traumatic events of September 11, 2001, the challenge to the United States’ unipolar supremacy within an ever-changing international system, and the influence of a determined intellectual elite often referred to as Neoconservative.¹ Each is analyzed in detail in chapters 2 through 5 of this volume.

The thesis of the book is that the controversial foreign policy of the Bush administration, reflected in the sharp decline of America’s legitimacy in the world and the increase in threats to its security, was a result of the manner in which President Bush, a small number of his advisers, and ideologues outside of his administration defined and responded to the events of September 11, 2001, and to the international challenges faced by the United States in general. The “power of definition”² enabled the president to shape reality and lead the United States toward a new, indeed revolutionary, foreign policy and to adopt, in effect, the overall ideational framework and many of the specific proposals offered by a group of Neoconservative intellectuals and policy advisers. While it cannot be denied that President Bush’s policies often reflected American traditions, institutions, and ideologies,³ he pushed many of those further than any president before him ever had.

Bush’s definition of the situation after 9/11, the adoption of policies based on this definition, and the response to these policies on the part of others in the international political system produced a new and, in general, highly negative reality. Because the initial definition by the president and his Neoconservative supporters was erroneous and misleading, it has led to a significant deterioration in America’s global standing, a process extensively described and analyzed in this volume.

Bush’s misguided leadership can be better understood through the lens of a fundamental sociopsychological phenomenon first described over forty years ago by Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton. The concept offered by Merton was the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Wrote Merton,

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation, evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come “true.” The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error [emphasis added].⁴

In the high-stakes area of international politics, the extreme behavior of a very powerful actor who adopts what Merton calls “a false definition of the situation” could potentially lead to catastrophic results. The more catastrophic the results, the more perpetual the “reign of error” and the deeper the belief of the perpetrator that his initial actions were, in fact, right. This belief does not allow the perpetrator and most of his supporters to liberate themselves from the initial action.

In a self-fulfilling situation in international politics, as in other fields, the very prediction (or prophecy) causes itself to become reality via the behavior of the party making the prediction. Put differently, the “prediction” is continuously validated by the perpetrator, regardless of how deceptive and misleading it may be in reality. The key in a self-fulfilling behavior is the three-stage relationship between the way a situation is initially defined by an actor, the behavior it causes this actor to adopt, and the new situation resulting from that behavior.

The systematic application of the notion of “self-fulfilling prophecy” to the foreign policy of the Bush administration is carried out in this book on several levels of analysis, starting with the international system. In chapter 2 (“The Challenge to America and the World”), international factors contributing to the development of the “false conception” are identified. The Bush administration arrived at the White House in a time of post–Cold War instability, with America challenged by the emergence of new or “rogue” nations (e.g., China, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) and the continuous instability in several of the world’s most volatile regions (e.g., the Middle East and the Balkans). From the beginning, the approach of the new administration was to act unilaterally and militaristically to tame and control the world. This attitude received great “validation” in the eyes of its supporters by the events of September 11, 2001. Thus, what began in the Bush administration as a hesitant, ill-defined prescription for a unilateralist and hegemonic foreign policy became a full-fledged elaborate interventionist ideology, with the actual implementation of several remarkable doctrinal innovations emphasizing preemption and prevention. On the international level, the self-fulfilling prophecy resulted from an overly pessimistic perspective, which transformed into an aggressive policy and led eventually to a much worse global situation.

A deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the specific self-fulfilling behavior associated with the foreign policy of the Bush administration must penetrate, beyond everything else, the ideological assumptions adopted by that administration. Chapter 3 attempts to offer such an understanding by focusing on what it calls the Neoconservative revolution. It examines the proposition that the Bush doctrine has been organically linked to Neoconservatism, the hypothesis being that the Neoconservatives produced the “prophecy” that gave the rationale for the foreign policy of the Bush administration.⁵ Neoconservatism is a right-of-center nationalist ideology that emphasizes American exceptionalism and calls upon the United States to act, even militarily and unilaterally, in order to establish hegemonic control abroad. While not all so-called Neocons endorse all elements of this definition with equal vigor, those are some of the core ideas of Neoconservatism as promoted by members of the movement, particularly following the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.

Chapter 4 focuses on the personality of George W. Bush as the man at the very center of the foreign policy from 2001 to 2008. While many observers have perceived President Bush as merely a puppet of other policy makers, particularly Vice President Richard Cheney, that position is rejected in this volume as fundamentally unsubstantiated. Chapter 4 argues that, in fact, Bush seems to have guided his own foreign policy, although he was deeply influenced by others. In this volume, it is also maintained that the Bush personality showed an inclination to adopt self-fulfilling prophecies and potentially self-fulfilling disasters. By his own admission and by the testimony of many others, Bush’s reactions to different situations tended to be nonanalytical, “gut” responses (that is, reactions that could have easily produced “false definitions of a situation”). More important, Bush had an openly Manichean worldview; he defined the world as a stage for the struggle between good and evil.⁶ The president tended to be utterly inflexible in pursuing his foreign policy goals,⁷ thus perpetuating what Merton has called “a reign of error.”

Chapter 5 assesses the impact of the decision-making process in the Bush White House on the establishment and perpetuation of the self-fulfilling behavior. It examines the argument that the worst inclinations of the president and the ideological impact of the Neoconservatives were exacerbated by a decision-making process in which some of the most hawkish members of the administration, particularly Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were in full control or were at least disproportionately influential. The decision-making process lacked self-criticism and intellectual openness.⁸

Chapter 6 (“Lessons for Future Presidents: America and the World beyond Bush and Neoconservatism”) reflects on how the United States might deal with its current and future challenges, some produced by the self-fulfilling mechanisms of the foreign policy of the past few years. Chapter 6 also offers and analyzes a new agenda for the next presidency. Among the ideas analyzed in this comprehensive chapter are demilitarizing American foreign policy, reinstituting “the diplomacy of consultation,” refocusing the United States on serious regional conflicts, emphasizing multilateralism and globalism, avoiding overreaching via clearer priorization, and, above all, preventing self-fulfilling disasters by limiting ideological blindness.

THE LEGACY

While foreign policy is invariably the result of numerous factors—and the function of the analyst is to identify the factors that are most significant—it is the particular relationships between the factors (e.g., the extent to which they reinforce each other) that often determine the actual result of the foreign policy adopted by a particular administration. In the case of the Bush administration, the ultimate result of the multifactor constellation (which includes the president’s personality, the Neoconservative ideology, the international challenges to America’s supremacy, and the White House decision-making process) has been a genuine, far-reaching revolution in American foreign policy.⁹ The dimensions of this revolution are comprehensively assessed in this study.

In promoting its revolutionary program, the Bush administration has adopted what could be described as an ideology-based rather than fact-driven foreign policy, an attitudinal prism somewhat detached from the reality of the international system. In historical terms, the new policy has amounted to a dramatic shift from the traditional principles of American foreign and security policy, particularly the strong American tendency toward pragmatism. Many observers have come to believe that this shift threatens not only the long-term interests of the United States but also, given the prominence of America in the global system, the well-being of the world community at large. It is argued in this volume that more important than any other factor, the United States lost legitimacy between 2001 and 2008.

While Bush’s foreign policy was sometimes perceived as “hard-nosed,” the fundamental problem in both its conception and implementation has been not its tough pursuit of realpolitik but precisely the opposite—its lack of realism. The policy had excessive utopian ideological commitment to unilateral American hegemony;¹⁰ in the minds of its supporters it reflected both the interests of the United States and of those dominated by it. Notions such as benevolent hegemony (assuming that even those controlled by the United States could benefit from its hegemony or would even appreciate it) were introduced into the lexicon in order to justify the new policy. The problem has been the considerable gap between what the United States could actually do to pursue that hegemony and what President Bush and his advisers believed it could do. Chapter 3 of this book provides a detailed account of the rationale that led to the hegemonic policy prescription, the Neoconservative ideology adopted by the Bush administration. The Neoconservatives, the people who gave Bush’s foreign policy its intellectual coherence and laid down its foundations, seem to be captives of their own ideological formulae. They began with the assumption that the United States could do all it wanted to do and that it could do it on its own. Therefore, they concluded, the United States should act alone.

When the terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001, occurred, the Neoconservatives, most members of the Bush administration, and many others came to believe (or acted as if they came to believe) that the world had dramatically changed overnight and that under the new circumstances US freedom of action had become limitless. This attitude is reflected in the words of Christian Brose in The National Interest: “What the September 11 attacks revealed about the nature of the unipolar world compelled the Bush administration to initiate an unprecedented reevaluation of international political thinking. Foreign states could come along willingly, reluctantly or not at all with the new US-wrought dispensation, but they certainly would not be allowed to ‘live past’ this monumental event. They would be compelled to realize not that God was dead, but that the old order was no more.”¹¹

Brose’s words, and those of numerous other commentators, reveal the centrality that many observers have tended to assign to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an event that is fully assessed in chapter 2 of this volume. The argument promoted is that September 11 was, in a way, a dual tragedy. First, it brought about the death of thousands of innocent people. Second, it allowed the Bush administration to introduce and implement a series of new but misguided initiatives that revolutionized American foreign policy. The last chapter of this volume examines the possibilities of returning to the bipartisan, pragmatic, Realist Washington consensus of the pre-Bush years.

In assessing the United States’ response to the events of September 11, 2001, it ought to be noted that despite the genuine psychological trauma of the terrorist attacks, the world has not changed in terms of the distribution of power. September 11 demonstrated that the United States could be hurt by nonstates and, more specifically, by terrorist organizations. Experts in the field have been aware of that reality and for years have warned policy makers about it. Whatever changes did occur as a result of September 11, 2001, they were surely not as fundamental as those that occurred in such overwhelmingly important years as 1918, 1945, or 1989. The United States remained the only genuine superpower after September 11, as it had been before. From the perspective of this volume, it is most important to note that the Bush administration and its ideological supporters inside and outside of government chose to react to September 11 as if it completely changed everything. This followed their particular “definition of the situation,” revealed in a long series of presidential speeches and comments. Moreover, the Bush administration successfully pushed policies based on the assumption that “everything changed,” thereby deepening and widening the crisis.

Secondary powers had begun to emerge as potential competitors with America even prior to September 11, although none of them genuinely threatened the overwhelming advantage of the United States.¹² Ironically, the Neoconservative recommendation that America ought to act unilaterally in the post-9/11 world, and the Bush administration’s adoption of this ill-conceived policy, strengthened those emerging secondary powers. This new policy made the challenge to the United States more serious than it had been before.

The fundamental assumption of a “changed world” that presumably threatens America’s global position, well-being, and even existence, and the unshaken resolve to revise US foreign policy on the basis of that assumption, mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 THE BUSH LEGACY: CONTROVERSIAL POLICY AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE
• CHAPTER 2 THE CHALLENGE TO AMERICA AND THE WORLD
• CHAPTER 3 THE NEOCONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION: THE IDEOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE BUSH DOCTRINE
• CHAPTER 4 THE PERSONALITY OF GEORGE W. BUSH
• CHAPTER 5 THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS
• CHAPTER 6 LESSONS FOR FUTURE PRESIDENTS: AMERICA AND THE WORLD BEYOND BUSH AND NEOCONSERVATISM
• Notes
• References
• Index