News - Bush Foreign Policy 1

Some quotes from Time Magazine, 1/15/2007, in an editorial by Peter Beinart, ...(more clips from the article may follow in each of the following several days)

It's an unwritten rule: each president gets one foreign policy doctrine. James Monroe’s was defense of the Americas. Harry S Truman’s was containment and George W. Bush's—spelled out after the defeat of the Taliban in 2002—was pre-emptive war to defeat terrorism and spread democracy. To a lot of people, it sounded good at the time. The country was united, the military was triumphant, and the mood was resolute. Americans were ready, literally, to take on the world.

Now it sounds crazy. The military is cracking from wartime strain. Isolationism is on the rise. Americans don't want to sustain one pre-emptive war, let alone start others.

And so the bush administration has begun cribbing from a very different doctrine: Richard Nixon’s. The Nixon doctrine is the foreign policy equivalent of outsourcing. Nixon unveiled it in 1969 to a nation wearied by Vietnam; no longer would Americans man the front lines against global communism. In Vietnam, we would turn the fighting over to Saigon. in the Persian gulf, we would build up Iran to check soviet expansion. America would no longer be a global cop; it would be a global benefactor, quartermaster and coach—helping allies contain communism on their own.

Now president bush is trying something similar. For much of 2006, administration officials fretted about Somalia, where some of the ruling Islamists had terrorist ties. Next door in Djibouti, America stations around 1,000 troops. but instead of sending them in, we turned to Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbor and longtime rival. When the Ethiopian military rolled into Mogadishu and sent the Islamists fleeing last week, the Bush administration kept a low profile, applauding the invasion and thanking its lucky stars that it was Ethiopia that launched it, not us.