Bush Team’s Tough Talk on Foreign Policy Alarms Experts

America’s foreign policy community is increasingly anxious about the Bush administration’s abrupt, tough-guy approach to several of the key challenges facing the United States. Many also charge that Washington may jeopardize key initiatives that are shaping the post-Cold War era.

In the latest public appeal, a coalition of top foreign policy specialists sent a letter to President Bush on Monday asking the new administration to resume diplomatic initiatives with North Korea. But the alarm spans a gamut of issues and the political spectrum.

“The foreign policy community is very anxious about Bush policy because it sees a rising level of rhetoric on China, going from ‘strategic partner’ to ‘competitor’; refusing to negotiate with the North Koreans; some very tough statements on Russia; a total rejection of climate control negotiations; and an emphasis in talks with all parties about missile defense,” said Lee Hamilton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, is a Democrat but is widely respected by people in both parties.

“This is all having a very unsettling impact on the international foreign policy community as well as heads of state,” he added.

The White House approach is all the more striking because of the Bush foreign policy team’s pledge to show humility in its dealings with the outside world. In his only major campaign speech on foreign policy, given at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Nov. 19, 1999, Bush called for a foreign policy that reflected American character, especially “the humility of real greatness.”

And in his debut speech at the State Department last month, the president told America’s diplomatic corps that his goal was to turn an era of American preeminence into generations of democratic peace, which would require the United States “to project our strength with purpose and with humility.”

Yet only nine weeks into Bush’s term, his administration’s approach to foreign policy has been described by leading analysts as defiant.

James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, expressed concern Monday about “schoolyard bellicosity” so early in a new presidency.

“Why are they so interested in saying to Russia that it’s mismanaging things, that it’s not that important anymore, that they’ll take its views into account but not treat them all that seriously? I’m mystified by it,” he said. “What can they possibly gain from this kind of schoolyard bellicosity at this stage?”

Bush Supporters Laud His No-Nonsense Style

Bush’s supporters argue that realism is needed. On several issues, the United States has become “flaccid, weak, ineffective and in some cases just wrong,” said Richard Perle, assistant secretary of Defense for international security during the Reagan administration.

The divide, he added, was between those who believe Washington should be assertive on national interests and those who had “subsided into a fuzzy internationalism.”

The president has not spent a lifetime adopting the vocabulary and mind-set of a professional diplomat, Perle said, but having a practical, no-nonsense president is good.

“Twenty years ago, you heard the same things about President Reagan when he talked about the ‘evil empire,’ ” he said.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright joined the debate over the Bush administration’s foreign policy Monday, after initially refraining from comment.

On Macedonia, she told Times editors in Los Angeles, the United States has lost critical momentum by not playing a more active role. The administration is also missing an opportunity by not pushing harder for elections in the Yugoslav region of Kosovo so that ethnic Albanians would see there is a stable future for them in a stable Balkan region, she said. It should also push harder to isolate Albanian extremists, she said.

“If you sit around and wait too long, the problems escalate, and a lot of things that you might have been able to deal with earlier kind of escape you,” she said.

Albright called the Bush decision to scrap the global warming treaty a “big mistake,” in part because the United States needs to live up to signed agreements. The 1997 agreement reached in Kyoto, Japan, calls for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but Bush recently said he would not begin regulating emissions from power plants.

“This does not help in terms of people understanding the signals that are coming out of Washington at this point,” she said.

Albright Says U.S. Should Pursue Talks

On North Korea, Albright said the United States is also losing an important opportunity by not pushing forward with negotiations on the regime’s offer to stop producing and selling its long-range missiles.

“Asia generally is the most dynamic area for change in international relations at the moment, and the United States has to be a part of it,” she said.

North Korea has become a focus of concern. In the letter to Bush, 30 prominent foreign policy analysts warned Monday that brushing off South Korea’s attempt to embrace North Korea risks reversing the most successful initiative in defusing the Cold War’s last conflict.

“If Pyongyang is indeed ready to take further steps toward strengthening peace on the peninsula, then the United States should be fully prepared to respond,” said the letter from the bipartisan, independent task force set up by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The panel includes Morton Abramowitz, former director of State Department intelligence and research; James R. Lilley, former ambassador to China; Winston Lord, former assistant secretary of State for Asia; and Robert L. Gallucci, chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea and now head of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Because of the cool U.S. response to South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” during his visit to Washington on March 7, the European Union has announced its own initiative. Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, whose country currently heads the EU, will soon visit the peninsula to revive mediation on a missile deal and reunification of the two Koreas.

Over the weekend, European leaders criticized Washington for its more hard-line approach and said the EU was forced to step in to help reduce tensions and any prospects that the missile deal would collapse.