Reality-Check Time at the White House

“We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless,” President Bush told students at the Virginia Military Institute last week. He needs to be.

Battered by a series of blows in both the Old World and the New, the Bush administration’s struggling foreign policy is headed for a trial by fire. U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s journey to the Middle East failed to bring an end to the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. Word came from intelligence sources that Osama bin Laden slipped through America’s fingers because U.S. ground troops were not used in the Tora Bora offensive. The shambolic coup attempt against Venezuela’s pro-Castro, pro-Iraq president, Hugo Chavez, exposed incompetence and vacillation in the U.S. government. And, despite administration pandering to steel protectionists, Congress has not given the president the trade-promotion authority he needs to move forward with new rounds of talks at the World Trade Organization and with hemispheric allies to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Meanwhile, the administration has yet to win support from key allies for the core element in its current strategy in the war on terror: forcing a change of regime in Iraq even if this requires a major military invasion by U.S. forces.

The confusion overseas is beginning to affect opinion polls. While support for Bush and for the war on terror remains strong, a large and growing percentage of Americans now doubt whether the administration has a coherent and viable strategy for prosecuting the war. With even Bush-friendly news outlets like The Wall Street Journal criticizing Bush’s foreign-policy performance, administration critics are sharpening their knives.

But both worried friends and eager critics should hold back a little. The administration’s foreign policy is not (yet) melting down; it’s going through the kind of agonizing reappraisal and adjustment that most administrations face sooner or later.

New administrations often come into Washington with strongly held opinions about U.S. foreign policy--and then slowly and painfully modify those views as they run up against the realities and imperfections of the outside world. Bill Clinton entered office vowing to put human rights ahead of trade in U.S. relations with China. He ended by supporting Beijing’s admission to the WTO.

The Bush administration came to office determined to reverse what it regarded as the Clinton administration’s excessive and irresponsible Wilsonianism. The Clintonistas, said the Bushies, thought too much about “soft power” and U.S. popularity in the world. Eager, sometimes almost desperate, to win friends and influence people abroad, the Clinton administration signed up for international treaties that conservatives felt were not always in the best interests of the U.S.: the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the treaty establishing an international criminal court and so on.

Forget all that Wilsonian claptrap, said the Bush team. Power doesn’t come because people like you, neo-conservatives argued. It comes when you take a strong position and stick with it. The United States should give up trying to serve the interests of the world community, said the Bush hawks, and concentrate instead on serving its own national interests in its own way.

Slowly, the Bush administration is waking up to learn that soft power counts. When U.S. foreign policy is popular in other countries, it is easier for governments to give us support. When--as now--that policy is deeply unpopular, governments are less willing and less able to help.

Events are forcing the Bush administration back toward the center--and, often, back toward policies resembling those of the Clinton administration. In the wake of the Venezuelan coup, an embarrassed administration scrambled to restate U.S. support for constitutional democracy throughout the region--even when it keeps people like Chavez in power. There is no clear exit strategy for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Bush’s VMI speech placed a new emphasis on nation- building and humanitarian work in that unhappy land. Having done its best to stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since January 2001, the administration finds itself in the same old diplomatic quagmire Clinton waded through--micromanaging a peace process in part to satisfy U.S. allies that we are capable of acting as an honest broker in the conflict.

Not that the original Bush position was all wrong. Strength counts. But it doesn’t count for everything. The Bush administration has been consistent and determined in its moves to get rid of Saddam Hussein--but the allies aren’t following. Some, notably the Europeans, may fall in line down the road, but most of our Middle East allies are likely to hang back or even oppose us.

Why? It is not because the Egyptian and Saudi regimes sympathize with Hussein. They hate him and they fear him. But these governments are weak--too weak to defy an aroused public opinion. They might like to follow America’s lead against Iraq, but they can’t. The U.S. agenda is too unpopular in the Middle East.

There is more to come, especially with respect to Iraq. It isn’t enough for Bush to repeat his assertion that Hussein is part of an “axis of evil.” The world has heard that message before, and has not been impressed. A new confrontation with Iraq will only make sense to U.S. allies if it is presented, at least in part, as a campaign for multilateralism and for arms control. Hussein is flagrantly defying both the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the United Nations arms inspection and control provisions of the cease-fire agreement he signed to end the Persian Gulf War.

President Bush needs to explain to the world that if Hussein gets away with this, the entire multilateral system of arms control becomes a useless set of unenforceable paper agreements. If bad guys can break vital treaties with no consequences, there is no point in writing treaties in the first place. This is the kind of message Europe and Japan like to hear. It tells the world why Hussein is dangerous; it reminds world opinion that the United States keeps its word and abides by the treaties we make; it reassures the world that the U.S. government intends to behave as a responsible international citizen--and that the world’s only superpower is not going rogue.

For some in the administration, there is a downside to making the campaign against Hussein a campaign for multilateral nonproliferation and arms-control agreements. It feels like a retreat to touchy-feely Wilsonianism. The reality, however, is that without an internationally credible Wilsonian dimension to the U.S. campaign against Iraq, international support simply won’t be forthcoming.

Sometimes, being tough, determined and relentless means eating your own words. Ronald Reagan did it when he returned to Jimmy Carter’s once despised human-rights policies. Carter did it when he abandoned his policy of accommodation with the Soviets to resist their invasion of Afghanistan. To fight the total war on terror that has become his No.1 goal, Bush must rebuild U.S. soft power. The result almost certainly will be a foreign policy that has more in common with the Clinton era than Bush or his closest advisors ever wanted or expected, but nobody ever said foreign policy was easy.