Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives

Days before the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom this past March, a well-known intellectual close to the White House walked me through the necessity and promise of the coming invasion. Whatever rancor it caused in the short term, he said, would pale in comparison to the payoff that would follow. In the months and years to come, Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny would write books and testify to the brutality of the regime, the bankruptcy of the Arab nationalism that stood idly by while they suffered, and the improvement of their lives. That testimony and the reality of an Iraqi state where basic human rights were respected would shatter the anti-Americanism that fills the Muslim Middle East and start a wave of change that would sweep over the region.

It was a breathtaking vision, and one that was difficult to dismiss out of hand. But from the vantage point of late 2003, it seems little better than a fantasy. To be sure, the war did eliminate a dangerous and evil regime. But the Bush administration greatly exaggerated the scale and imminence of the danger Saddam posed, while dramatically underestimating the cost and burden of the postwar occupation. The prewar links between Iraq and terrorism proved to be as minimal as skeptics had charged. And the Iraqis' feelings toward their liberators turned out to be more ambivalent than Washington had assumed, the regional ripple effects less extensive, and the diplomatic damage of the whole episode worse and longer lasting.

The Bush administration's foreign policy has played out equally poorly on other fronts as well. The administration came into office scoffing at Clinton's "appeasement" of North Korea, and soon stiffened its hard-line stance further by including Pyongyang in the "axis of evil." But after the North's clandestine uranium enrichment program was disclosed in late 2002, the administration slowly backtracked. The White House is now not only negotiating with Kim Jong Il and discussing a security guarantee, but it has even broached the possibility of granting him more aid before he dismantles his nuclear programs -- a line the White House repeatedly pledged not to cross. The grand result of the Bush team's tough approach is that North Korea now has two ongoing nuclear weapons programs, while U.S. relations with South Korea have deteriorated dramatically.

In Israel, meanwhile, the situation is strikingly similar. After giving a low priority to the peace process during his first two years in office, George W. Bush pushed the "road map" for peace while relegating Yasir Arafat to the sidelines. At first, this approach appeared to lead to some progress, but a few months later it collapsed. Finding himself stymied, the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, resigned; Arafat faces death or expulsion while being lionized among his constituents; bombings continue; and the region is as volatile and violent as ever.

THE MIND OF THE PRESIDENT

"America Unbound," by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, is one of the first in what promises to be a long line of efforts to tell these stories and take stock of the United States' tumultuous role in the world under Bush. In 200 short, painless pages, the authors present an overview of the first 30 months of the Bush administration's foreign policy -- a lucid and concise account of what the authors call "the Bush revolution" in foreign affairs.

Although written by two staffers of Clinton's National Security Council, the book is not quite what one might expect. It is conspicuously short on polemics or rancor, and there is no score settling. If anything, the authors go out of their way to give the president and his chief advisers the benefit of most doubts. Daalder and Lindsay provide a clear, almost clinical, review of the intellectual roots of the administration's policy, the key personages involved, and the way the president used both to guide the nation from the relative quiescence of early 2001 through the storm clouds of 2003.

Their emphasis on the president is no accident. According to the authors, Bush was no figurehead or pawn in the revolution that bears his name, but rather the key decision-maker. "Bush," they write, may not have spent any time consciously trying to develop a philosophy about foreign affairs. However, a lifetime of experience had left deeply formed beliefs -- instincts might be more precise -- about how the world works and, just as important, how it does not. ... The fact that Bush could not translate his gut instincts into a form that would please political science Ph.D.s really did not matter.

The book's central argument is simple and, by now, familiar: the president's unilateralist policies have produced quick victories in Afghanistan and Iraq but have also fractured the nation's alliances, and as a result the world system is more chaotic and unfriendly, and the United States is less secure. Daalder and Lindsay are concerned about more than the truculent face the administration sometimes shows abroad. "The deeper problem," they write in the book's concluding chapter, is that "the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was profoundly mistaken."

The strength of the book's contribution lies not in the originality of its thesis but in its clarity and brevity, its mastery of detail, and its analysis of the essential continuity of the administration's policy before and after September 11, 2001. The attacks on that day allowed President Bush to refashion American foreign policy in a far bolder and more audacious fashion than otherwise would have been possible, the authors argue, but in fact the administration's essential goals, premises, and assumptions changed very little.