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U.S. ELECTION: New Bush Foreign Policy Posture Unlikely

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 2004 (IPS) - Earnest hopes that U.S. President George W Bush will be prepared to seriously ”reach out” to U.S. friends and allies overseas to make his foreign policy less aggressive and unilateral in his second term are likely to be earnestly disappointed.

Earnest hopes that U.S. President George W Bush will be prepared to seriously ”reach out” to U.S. friends and allies overseas to make his foreign policy less aggressive and unilateral in his second term are likely to be earnestly disappointed.

What adjustments are made in a second term will probably take Washington in a more isolationist direction, or at least one that further estranges the United States from its European allies, consistent with the administration’s unilateralist tendencies.

While much depends on the anticipated reshuffling of senior posts that traditionally takes place in a second term, the consensus among experts here is that hard-liners led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been the strongest single foreign-policy influence on the president, are likely to be strengthened.

While many of those hard-liners are neo-conservatives whose rhetorical support for Washington’s "mission" to spread democracy around the world is fervent, to say the least, they are far more devoted to those aspects of the ”Bush doctrine” that exalt U.S. exceptionalism, military dominance and pre-emption, so long as they are used for the benefit of Israel, as well.

The almost-certain departure of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose own powers of persuasion and public stature will be impossible for any successor to duplicate, will remove from the highest councils of government the only real counter-force to Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, whose fate is uncertain. Powell is also the last remaining link to the multilateralism practiced by both Bush’s father and former President Bill Clinton.

Cheney’s declaration Wednesday that Bush now has a ”mandate” – despite scraping by with a bare 51 percent majority – signals the inner circle’s conviction that the election itself confirms the essential righteousness of their global agenda, beginning with its decision to invade Iraq as part of the ”war on terrorism”.

”What is not well appreciated is that this is a team that has a very close relationship with a worldview set in plaster”, said Kurt Campbell, a former senior Pentagon official who now serves as vice president of the Centre for Security and International Studies (CSIS) here.

”The election is seen by them not only as a mandate but (as confirmation) that, ‘we are right and we are on the right track’."

This interpretation of the election results as a mandate is compounded by the strengthening of the more-extreme elements within the Republican Party coming out of this election.

The four seats the party gained in the Senate – where it will soon hold a solid 55-45 majority – were all claimed by southerners identified with the Christian Right, many of whose leaders see the ”war on terror” as an apocalyptic clash between Christendom and the Islamic world, and view Europeans and Democrats as ”appeasers” of evil.

”For (those) who might expect more ‘moderation’ and ‘bipartisanship’ for the second term”, wrote Chris Nelson, whose daily newsletter is read closely by Asia specialists and policy-makers here, ”our experts here just hoot, and say that the internal dynamics of the ‘new’ Republican Party is open for all to see … it is socially conservative, religious, pro-gun, anti-abortion and gay rights, anti-government spending, except on defence, and very, very aggressive in dealing with ‘opposition’. There’s a war on, and don’t you ever forget it”.

This does not mean that Bush and his top aides, as they did during the protracted election campaign, will continue to ignore or deny the serious problems they face in the war on terrorism, according to experts, who note this week’s announcement that the Netherlands and Hungary will withdraw their troops from Iraq in just five months underlines Washington’s growing isolation there.

Indeed, that the Pentagon’s neo-conservatives have largely lost control over Iraq policy to the National Security Council (NSC) and the State Department over the past year demonstrated that Bush is able to shift policy in significant ways – giving up, for example, on ”transforming” Iraq into a democratic model for the Middle East – even though he refuses to admit it publicly.

Moreover, in Iraq – which Campbell and others predict will continue to monopolise the administration’s attention for at least the next six months – the administration faces serious budgetary and military constraints – including real shortages of personnel and equipment – that are of growing concern even to Republican right-wingers.

Those factors will likely strengthen the party’s isolationist elements, who have loved Bush’s unilateralism but distrusted his larger, nation- and democracy-building ambitions.

”Are we going to continue on the offence, where we make more enemies than we can defeat”? asked Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and a major figure on the extreme right for several decades, in a ‘New York Times’ interview Thursday. ”Or are we going to return to the traditional foreign policy that we do not attack unless attacked?”

”It’s true that there are a lot of people in the Republican Party who are very uncomfortable with the neo-conservative neo-Wilsonian (approach) of the Bush administration”, according to Walter Russell Mead, a foreign-policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

”They are traditionally sceptical of democracy in foreign countries and international entanglements. So you may start seeing more Republican resistance to the most visionary and sweeping elements of Bush’s foreign policy approach.”

Some experts believe Iraq’s continuing impact on the record U.S. budget deficit built up under Bush will adversely affect Washington’s ability and willingness to address other foreign-policy and global problems in ways that could further isolationist tendencies.

”There are going to be very significant resources needed for global challenges, such as HIV-AIDS, apart from the war on terrorism”, noted Teresita Schaffer, a former top South Asia policymaker now with CSIS. ”I’ve got to believe that’s going to be much more difficult to obtain in the future”.

Much of the speculation now centres on who will occupy key positions, including the two top posts in the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC especially, if, as expected, Condoleezza Rice gives up the national security advisor post and either returns to academia or takes over at State or Defence.

Of particular interest is the fate of John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, an ultra-unilateralist who, as a Cheney loyalist, has played a key role in undermining Powell’s efforts to pursue a more-moderate, multilateralist course on two critical issues that, after Iraq, are already on the front-burner: Iran and North Korea.

Bolton’s promotion to deputy secretary of state, deputy national security adviser or even national security adviser would signal a clear rejection of the notion of the administration ”reaching out” to traditional U.S. allies.

The future of neo-conservative Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is also a major subject of speculation, in part because he has been made the major scapegoat in Congress for Washington’s setbacks in Iraq and may not be able to be confirmed by the Senate for a senior cabinet post.

Although more multilaterally inclined than Bolton, his selection as Bush’s national security adviser (which does not require Senate confirmation), would also signal Cheney’s continued influence, as Wolfowitz and the vice president – as well as Cheney’s own national security adviser I. Lewis Libby – are particularly close.