The ‘Prudence Party’ Takes On an Insurgent

To President Bush’s supporters, nothing is more exhilarating than his willingness, even eagerness, to challenge long-established assumptions and policies, especially in foreign policy. “As an insurgent, with few ties in Washington,” conservative journalist Fred Barnes wrote admiringly in his recent book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” “Bush has found it easy to overturn major policies with scarcely a second thought.”

To Bush’s critics, that’s exactly the problem.

As his second term proceeds, he’s facing increasing resistance from what might be called the “prudence party.” The prudence party represents a particular corner of the U.S. establishment. Informal and amorphous, it is populated by top-level corporate and Wall Street executives, former diplomats, retired military officers and some veteran legislators on Capitol Hill.

As a group, the prudence party is more Republican than Democratic. In modern political terms, it is more centrist than conservative, though it is profoundly conservative in the word’s traditional meaning: it looks skeptically at radical change, especially when it is implemented “with scarcely a second thought.” The prudence party generally believes that assumptions and procedures that have lasted for decades are usually so entrenched for a good reason. It has a healthy respect for the law of unintended consequences.

During Bush’s first term, the prudence party gnashed its teeth over his movement to downplay America’s reliance on our traditional allies, a tendency that culminated in the decision to invade Iraq without explicit authorization from the United Nations. But mostly those in this group bit their tongues.

Signs of the unease emerged in the 2004 presidential campaign. One came when several retired generals prominently endorsed the Democratic candidate, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Another was a statement issued during the campaign from a separate group of retired diplomats and military officials criticizing Bush’s foreign policy.

But both of those groups tilted toward names identified more with the Democratic side of the foreign policy establishment. In Bush’s second term, a broader spectrum of voices from the prudence party have dissented. The demands from retired military officers for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld earlier this year offered one indication of the discontent in these circles.

Even more telling was the resistance Bush faced in his effort to redefine U.S. obligations under the Geneva Convention toward detainees in the war on terrorism.

It wasn’t particularly surprising to find Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina leading that opposition; both are iconoclasts who have opposed Bush on other national security choices.

But behind them stood Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the 79-year-old chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, former Secretary of the Navy and the virtual white-haired embodiment of the prudence party.

And behind Warner stood an even more imposing phalanx of gray eminences -- retired Gen. John Vessey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan; George P. Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State; and, above all, Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for George H.W. Bush and the first-term Secretary of State for George W. Bush. All three, as well as another group of more than two dozen former military and State Department officials, played a more visible role than any congressional Democrat in blocking Bush’s proposal.

Powell’s resistance attracted the most attention. But Vessey captured the thinking of the prudence party most eloquently in his letter opposing any reinterpretation of the Geneva Convention.

In essence, Vessey rejected the core Bush argument that Islamic terrorism has created a threat so transcendent as to demand the abandonment of America’s traditional approaches to ensuring its security. “I continue to read and hear that we are facing a ‘different enemy’ in the war on terror; no matter how true that may be, inhumanity and cruelty are not new to warfare nor to enemies we have faced in the past,” Vessey wrote. “Through those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so.”

Debate will continue for weeks over whether Warner, Graham and McCain sufficiently upheld those values in the deal they struck with the administration on the treatment of detainees. What’s clear is that the dispute represented a kind of tipping point for many of the establishment figures who supported those senators -- a moment when Bush’s inclination to jettison established approaches collided too directly with their respect for the ways America has conducted itself since World War II.

Retired Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, believes the disagreement became a flashpoint for growing concern that the administration, in its responses to the terrorism threat, “has made a radical departure from traditional political and cultural values as well as what heretofore was a rather consistent strain in foreign policy.”

Others might not criticize the administration so pointedly. But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see in the statements from Powell and others the fear that Bush has too casually alienated world opinion in his pursuit of greater security for America.

The pillars of the prudence party don’t like to publicly air their disagreements. The fact that so many did so in this dispute is probably a warning sign to the White House that it could face more resistance from some of the same voices if it pursues other avenues seen as flouting international norms or global opinion, such as unilateral military action against Iran. Through 2008, Bush’s disputes with these voices of restraint may shape America’s national security decisions more than his arguments with the Democrats.

ronald.brownstein@ latimes.com