Aggressive - and ineffective - approach abandoned in favour of diplomacy

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 2, 2007
The Guardian


The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, watches president George Bush speak during a swearing-in ceremony for the deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, in Washington. Photograph: Jay Clendenin/Getty Images
 
It is being called George Bush's Come to Jesus moment. As in the midlife realisation that led Mr Bush to give up alcohol and embrace Christianity, the president in his sixth year in the White House has undergone another radical conversion, abandoning an ideological foreign policy for a more pragmatic approach, foreign policy experts say.
Within the space of two weeks, the Bush administration has made dramatic steps towards diplomatic engagement of two countries once shunned as part of the Axis of Evil - agreeing to contacts with Iran and opening the door to recognition of North Korea.


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In Washington, the shift was seen yesterday as a belated acknowledgement that the administration's approach to the world - on Iraq, nuclear weapons proliferation, and Middle East peace - was not just ineffective, but dangerous.

"The main thing was that there was a sense that American foreign policy was spinning out of control. The administration was looking at one series of failures after another and these were really beginning to damage national security," said James Steinberg, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now heads the Lyndon Johnson school of public affairs in Texas.

Others attribute the conversion in part as a product of Mr Bush's stark view of the world. "It is the president's impulse-driven, faith-driven, black-and-white view of the world that enabled the hardline contingent within the administration to pursue the path that it pursued," said David Rothkopf, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who is writing a book about US foreign policy. "It is only the shift in recognition that that approach isn't working that has created very much the equivalent of his Come to Jesus moment when he was 40."

The deepening chaos in Iraq, the heightened nuclear tensions with Iran and North Korea, and the instability in Lebanon also served to discredit the approach advocated by the hardline powers within the administration: the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the former Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld.

Until Mr Rumsfeld was sacked last November, the two men, friends and ideological soulmates for the last 30 years, had formed a powerful neoconservative front. Mr Rumsfeld's exit, and the departure earlier of other neocons, left Mr Cheney relatively isolated. That allowed for the rise of a new foreign policy pairing: the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence chief, Robert Gates.

Both are viewed as proteges of Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under the first President Bush, whose view of the world is almost diametrically opposed to his son's. Bolstered by that institutional ally - and a state department bureaucracy dominated by career service officers rather than politically driven appointees - Ms Rice has been more confident in recent weeks in asserting her views. As a longtime friend of the president, she also has his ear and was able to transform policy.

Some see recent belligerent comments on Iranian support for Shia militias in Iraq as an early sign that talks could be on the cards. "Both Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates made remarks about a month ago that said: 'look, if the negotiations are going to be successful, you have to get the context right'," said Paul Serwer, vice-president of the US Institute for Peace. "I had been hoping that what they were doing with all these manoeuvres and cracking down was to get the context right."

Such changes were not instantaneous as they appeared this week, but they could be even more far-reaching. Philip Gordon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, published an article on US foreign policy last July called The End of the Bush Revolution.

He notes shifts in US foreign policy as early as 2005 when President Bush on a tour of Europe made a point of visiting France and Germany - a change from his 2001 itinerary that saw the president shunning his critics. Mr Gordon also notes that Ms Rice spent far more time courting European allies in her first year as secretary of state than her predecessor, Colin Powell, spending 70% of her time abroad in Europe in 2005.

In another less noted foreign policy reversal, the administration two years ago began to revise its position on international aid and climate change, in an attempt to improve its image.

The softening of the line on North Korea and Iran was also linked yesterday to the growing realisation that the US position had been based on faulty intelligence. In a repeat of the intelligence fiasco in the run-up to the Iraq war, it now appears US agencies overestimated the threat posed by the Pyongyang and Tehran nuclear programmes.

"Inside of all of this is a much bigger problem," Mr Rothkopf said. "This once again underscores how bad the intelligence community....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2025025,00.html

Agree with that sentiment enviro.


Post on this again later.