Global Realities Reshaping Bush Foreign Policy Vision

In shaping its foreign policy, the Bush administration is undergoing a reality check. It’s also sounding more and more like the Clinton administration.

During the campaign, candidate George W. Bush called for a “distinctly American internationalism” that would stand firm against dictators such as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and hold Communist China in check. Yet so far, his foreign policy team is largely picking up where the last one left off, with only nips and tucks here and there.

Even last week’s flap over relations with North Korea, which provided the first detectable sign of a shift in U.S. policy, does not abandon the initiative launched by then-President Clinton last year to engage one of the last Cold War holdouts.

“With the exception of missile defense and a few other issues, the Bush administration has taken on the look of the very people they wanted to differ from,” said James Gibney, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. “They’ve backed away from more controversial campaign pronouncements, like pulling troops out of the Balkans and putting the American Embassy in Jerusalem. And they’re finding they will have to soft-pedal on other issues, such as North Korea and Iraq, if they want to bring our allies along.”

The new administration’s comprehensive review of U.S. foreign policy is still far from complete, as Bush officials frequently point out, and many players on its team have yet to be named.

Still, many of the administration’s initial pronouncements are sounding increasingly familiar--to both Democrats and Republicans.

“There are realities in this world,” reflected Leon Fuerth, who was national security advisor to then-Vice President Al Gore. “And it’s interesting to see that as the Bush administration foreign policy team encounters the realities, they are forced to make adjustments that bring them into the band of policy that the previous administration occupied.”

Some Republicans already are up in arms. On Iraq, the Bush administration’s plans to streamline sanctions imposed a decade ago led to a blistering attack by conservatives. The administration’s proposal would merely modify “Clinton’s feckless approach to Iraq,” the Weekly Standard charged in its March 12 issue.

“The new smart sanctions will prove no more effective or enduring than the old dumb sanctions,” wrote conservative commentators Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Only by calling for Hussein’s removal from power, as opposed to Clinton’s policy of “containment,” can the United States end the stampede in the Arab world toward full normalization of relations with Iraq, they said.

The administration claims that it will do more to oust the regime. “Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from his opposition, to remove him,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine as an advisor to Bush during his presidential campaign.

But the goal mirrors a pledge made by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to bar Iraq from rejoining the community of nations until it had a new regime.

Conservative Concern

For conservatives, Iraq policy is just the tip of the iceberg. “It is not too soon to start worrying that President Bush may be content to continue walking down dangerous paths in foreign and defense policy laid out over the past eight years by Bill Clinton,” Kagan and Kristol wrote.

Conservatives are particularly alarmed that Bush may continue the previous administration’s “dangerous courtship of China,” the magazine warned. During the campaign, Bush said he looked at Beijing as a “strategic competitor” rather than as a “strategic partner,” the label coined by the Clinton team.

Yet the Bush administration is committed to seeing China become an active member of the World Trade Organization. And it backs the “three-noes” policy: No to a two-China policy, no to Taiwanese independence and no to Taiwanese membership in international organizations that require sovereignty, all of which are long-standing U.S. policy.

And Bush is likely to go to Shanghai in October for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, following a tradition started by Clinton.

“If Bush does rush off to see [Chinese President Jiang Zemin] in the fall, it will be still more evidence that Bill Clinton’s foreign policy has outlasted Bill Clinton,” Kagan and Kristol wrote.

North Korea is another area in which the Bush administration is basically picking up where its predecessor left off by supporting the South Korean “sunshine policy” designed to end the North’s isolation and eventually reunify the peninsula.

The new team is also expected to build on Clinton’s efforts to persuade North Korea to end its missile proliferation, although with a broader focus that will include the Communist regime’s conventional military capability and nuclear power program.

“As we look at the elements of the negotiation that the previous administration had left behind, there are some things there that are very promising,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday. “What was not there was a monitoring and verification regime of the kind that we would have to have in order to move forward in negotiations with such a regime.”

The phenomenon of policy holdover is hardly new. Foreign policy is traditionally the area in which the least change occurs from one administration to another.

“Every new administration comes in and wants to review policy and take a fresh look and come to its own conclusions. But the reality that they ultimately confront is that U.S. interests don’t change and the constraints don’t change, and therefore you’re often working within a narrower band of options than it looks from the outside,” said Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor.

The same was true with the transfer of power eight years ago from the president’s father, George Bush, to Clinton. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton said he would not return fleeing Haitians to their troubled country as long as it was ruled by a military dictatorship. But after his inauguration, Clinton realized that several hundred thousand Haitians were building boats to set sail for the U.S.

“So we reversed course and embraced the same policy President Bush did,” Berger recalled.

Balkan Commitment

The new Bush administration faces a similar issue in the Balkans. During his campaign, Bush talked about accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But during Powell’s recent visit to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters, the secretary of state pledged that U.S. forces would not leave prematurely. “We went in together, and we’ll go out together,” Powell told a news conference in Brussels.

After meeting with the administration last week, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said the Bush team had been “quick to knock down” the impression that it would change the original commitment. “The president said he would not leave the allies in the lurch,” Robertson said Friday.

The transition from candidate to president “tends to reinforce continuity over discontinuity,” Berger said. “When you become president and have a responsibility for an outcome, you realize the costs that would incur in terms of allies, and the danger of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Over time, the administration’s strategy will take on its own complexion. Events will dictate policy amendments or changes. Israel has a new government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The year-old government of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is constricting press freedoms.

Some differences already are clear. The Bush administration opposes the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as the proposal to create an International Criminal Court that Clinton accepted in his final days. It plans to assume a lower profile in Arab-Israeli negotiations, although the previous administration did the same--until the Norwegians mediated a framework for talks called the Oslo accords.

And Powell, formerly both national security advisor and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, already has a doctrine named after him that is likely to play a role in shaping Bush strategy. It calls for military intervention only when there is a sufficient commitment to ensure victory, a clear-cut goal and a definite exit plan.

Yet the principles of the post-Cold War world established during the Clinton administration may continue to influence policy well into Bush’s tenure. Among those tenets are controversial decisions to back economic bailouts of Mexico and Southeast Asia, steps that the new administration has indicated it would be reluctant to take.

“I can’t wait to see how Treasury Secretary [Paul H.] O’Neill backs away from the campaign’s stand on bailouts when it faces the first real foreign financial crisis. It’s dodged a couple of bullets already with Turkey and Argentina,” said Gibney, of Foreign Policy magazine.

“But when the balloon goes up somewhere important, I suspect it won’t want to take the risk that it will be responsible for either a regional or global financial meltdown,” Gibney said. “So it may well end up doing what the last administration did.”