Bush’s Team Isn’t About to Make Waves

As President-elect George W. Bush’s new foreign-policy appointments photocopy their tax returns and fill out the paperwork for their confirmation hearings, the rest of the world is biting its knuckles over what the new team might do.

China is worried that GOP attacks on President Bill Clinton’s pro-Beijing policy mean that a Bush administration will “tilt” toward Taiwan and containment of China. Russia and a lot of other countries are anxious that a GOP commitment to a national missile-defense system will cause the Bush administration to tear up three decades of arms-control treaties in a unilateral rush toward absolute U.S. superiority in both offensive and defensive capabilities.

The European Union is still uneasy about National Security Advisor-designate Condoleezza Rice’s remarks that a Bush administration might pull U.S. peacekeepers out of Kosovo. Environmentalists around the world fret about the fate of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the unratified agreement on greenhouse-gases to curtail global warming. Israelis and Palestinians are troubled about the future of the battered peace process without the hands-on support of a well-briefed U.S. president and working from years of experience with the intricacies of Middle East diplomacy.

The last time the world worried this much about U.S. foreign policy was in late 1992, when statesmen and pundits wrung their hands and wondered about an untested President-elect Clinton, whose campaign had promised to downgrade foreign policy, alienate China, pander to Israeli settlers and defy Europe over the Balkans. With a foreign-policy team mostly recycled from the discredited Carter administration, Clinton seemed jinxed by a series of embarrassing mishaps in places like Somalia. For several months, French President Jacques Chirac even claimed to see a vacuum in the leadership of the Free World, and modestly proposed that he stood ready to fill it.

Now the Clinton they once scorned and feared is the security blanket that foreigners cling to. But once the Bush administration gets through the inevitable wobbles of its early months, foreigners are likely to wake up and realize that U.S. foreign policy remains relatively constant and predictable from year to year, even from decade to decade.

As Rice and Secretary of State-designate Colin L. Powell have taken pains to point out, U.S. foreign policy on their watch will be centered on the same interests and values that steered the Clinton administration and have basically guided the United States since World War II. The United States will play the world role that Britain played in its heyday, serving as what Woodrow Wilson’s friend and confident Col. Edward M. House called “the gyroscope of world order.” To that end, the United States will remain a great power in both Europe and Asia, willing to work with everyone interested in preventing the outbreak of conflicts in historically combustible continents.

In playing that role, the United States will be guided by the conviction that freedom is the most secure basis for peace. Free markets are the best way to create the prosperity that reduces political tensions among and within nations; free governments and free elections ensure that peace-loving majorities, rather than warmongering elites, shape policy in partner countries.

These principles may seem vague and abstract, but they explain about 90% of the conduct of U.S. foreign policy at any given moment. Our longstanding support for the integration of a united democratic Germany in a united democratic Europe dates back to the Truman administration. Our determination to base forces in Asia to maintain a balance of power is similarly a legacy of World War II, along with our hope that, one day, the growth of an Asian community of peaceful, democratic states can permanently reduce the security challenges in the Pacific. Our policy of encouraging economic integration, free trade and democracy in Latin America dates to Franklin D. Roosevelt and reflects a U.S. dream of a peaceful, democratic and pan-American alliance of republics that goes back to 19th-century statesman Henry Clay.

There can be no doubt that on these basic elements of national strategy, the Bush administration will stand in the U.S. mainstream. Other areas are predictable, too. In the Middle East, for example, the United States will continue to support Israel’s right to live within safe and defensible frontiers, while urging Israel in its own best interest to offer Palestinians the most generous terms possible. The Bush administration will continue to offer protection to the oil-rich Gulf states and, like the Clinton administration, will seek better relations with Iran while trying to find alternatives to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Sympathy for Taiwanese democracy will wrestle, sometimes uneasily, with the need to keep U.S.-Chinese relations on an even footing.

During presidential campaigns, challengers inevitably accuse incumbents of all kinds of sins and shortcomings. Candidate Clinton attacked President George Bush; candidate George W. attacked President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. After Inauguration Day, things change.

For a recent spectacular example, look at Clinton’s turnaround on China policy. After denouncing President Bush for stressing trade over human rights, President Clinton reversed course and ended up endorsing unconditional permanent normal trade with Beijing.

Look for more of the same under Bush. The United States will probably not disengage from Kosovo as rapidly as some campaign speeches suggested, and if the Balkans blow up again, and Germany calls 911, a President Bush will pick up the phone. Despite the strong GOP commitment to national missile defense, the political, technical and budgetary issues involved are so complex that progress toward deployment will not accelerate overnight. A Bush administration may be slow to embrace “humanitarian interventions” like the one in Haiti--but since the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration has shown much less eagerness for these interventions as well. Similarly, on Russia policy, the Clinton administration has already done what Bush proposes and moved from fecklessly cheering Russian “reform” to a more realistic policy of disciplined engagement.

On trade, the Bush administration will support Clinton’s proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas and, assuming that Congress remains reluctant to grant fast-track authority, the new administration will take a leaf out of outgoing U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky’s playbook and shift to bilateral trade negotiations, where fast track isn’t needed.

More broadly, the Bush administration will continue, and perhaps even accelerate, the slow, quiet trend in U.S. foreign policy away from a Euro-centric view of the world toward a deeper engagement in Asia and Latin America. This isn’t isolationism or euro-phobia; with Slobodan Milosevic out of the way, and Russia hobbled by its own weakness, Europe is more stable than at any time since Otto von Bismarck’s day. Currently, the greatest threats to U.S. security and our greatest emerging economic opportunities lie in places like the Pacific Rim, the Middle East and Mexico, rather than Germany and France, and any president will shape policy accordingly.

Where changes do occur, most of them will be more symbolic than substantive. Ending U.S. assistance for U.N. population-control programs may be a bone thrown to conservatives; Bush is likely to highlight, rather than downplay, U.S. skepticism toward grand global initiatives like the 1997 Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol and the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 1998. But this doesn’t mean that the Bush administration will be able to avoid these issues. On greenhouse gases, for example, if the new administration tries to get out of the Kyoto framework, it will have to make new proposals; substantively, given the strength of environmental lobbies here and abroad, the new U.S. position could end up involving stronger initiatives than Clinton’s final offer on Kyoto.

One likely area for more substantive change is U.S. policy toward Japan. The Bush team believes that Clinton’s State Department neglected Japan, and his Treasury Department gave it bad advice. In a Bush administration, look for the Treasury to side more aggressively with the Japanese reformers who want an end to endless stimulus packages, while the State Department makes U.S.-Japanese relations a much higher priority and the U.S. trade representative explores a U.S.-Japan free-trade treaty as a way of strengthening the partnership between the two largest economies in the world.

Otherwise, the most likely outlook is for more of the same. The rhetoric and the packaging will change, but underneath will be the same old gyroscope of world order, spinning as hard as it can to make a world of free states and free markets. *