[Mb-civic] The curious disconnect in US foreign policy>By James Mann

[Michael Butler]

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The curious disconnect in US foreign policy
>By James Mann
>Published: April 16 2006 20:00 | Last updated: April 16 2006 20:00
>>

The Bush administration has passed a milestone in recent weeks. In pursuit
of President George W. Bush’s call for the spread of democracy around the
world, the administration has explicitly repudiated the realist approach to
foreign policy that once dominated the Republican party under Richard Nixon,
Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.

The latest sign was the statement by Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of
state, at a news conference in Blackburn on her recent UK visit, that
America had abandoned 60 years of trying to “buy stability at the expense of
democracy” in the Middle East. The more significant indication was a
little-noticed change in the administration’s view of the world, laid out in
its new national security strategy last month.

For decades now, the Republicans have been divided into two camps on foreign
policy. The first are realists, such as Nixon, Kissinger and Scowcroft, who
emphasised national interests, not ideals; they stressed considerations such
as the preservation of stability and the balance of power. Their opponents –
today’s neo-conservatives, the Republican wing once led by Ronald Reagan –
contend that the US should devote its foreign policy to combating tyranny.

In its first national security strategy in mid-2002, drafted under the
direction of Ms Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy,
Stephen Hadley, now Mr Bush’s national security adviser, the administration
summarised its policies with a key phrase: the US would seek what was called
a “balance of power that favours human freedom”. Those words represented a
classic compromise – or call it a truce – between the party’s two warring
wings: “balance of power” for the realists, “human freedom” for the
neo-cons.

The 2002 document contained some far-reaching ideas about dealing with
terrorism – including, most prominently, the call for pre-emptive military
attack. Yet, outside the Middle East, the administration seemed to view the
world in conventional Kissingerian terms: stability, national interests,
balance of power. The 2002 strategy singled out China, Russia and India as
three centres of global power.

The new national security strategy is strikingly different. The phrase
“balance of power that favours human freedom” has been dropped. There is
quite a bit about freedom and spreading democracy, but not about the realist
concept of a balance of power. Gone is the section that four years ago
grouped China, Russia and India as great powers. They are treated in the
2006 document as three countries among many. For the first time, the US
seems to be saying its power is so great that there can be – and need be –
no balance or stability.

What has happened in four years to change the administration’s view? One
factor is certainly the aftermath of the Iraq war. After failing to find
weapons of mass destruction there, the administration increasingly seized on
the idea of democracy as the principal justification for the war. Since
then, the idea of democracy promotion has become the guiding rationale for
the administration’s foreign policy.

That means the Bush foreign policy team is now operating with a curious
disjunction between its rhetoric and its personnel. When it comes to
personnel, the neo-cons have clearly been in decline in Mr Bush’s second
term. As secretary of state, Ms Rice has surrounded herself with careful
pragmatists such as Robert Zoellick, deputy secretary of state, and Nicholas
Burns, undersecretary of state – officials whom realists like and neo-cons
mistrust. Meanwhile, several key neo-con, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith, have left the Pentagon which has, moreover, been weakened
institutionally by intensifying disputes between Donald Rumsfeld, the
defence secretary, and retired military leaders over the management of the
Iraq war.

But that is in the realm of personnel. On the underlying principles that
guide US foreign policy, the neo-cons have the upper hand and the realists
are in decline. To be sure, Ms Rice, Mr Hadley and other officials have
tried hard to work more closely with Europe and avoid the assertive
unilateralism of Mr Bush’s first term. But they now reg­ularly espouse the
ideas first put forward by the neo-cons.

At her Blackburn news conference, Ms Rice explained the push for democracy
in the Middle East, noting that previously, “there was a kind of Middle East
exceptionalism in American policy”, a belief that “certain people . . .
really weren’t quite ready for self-governance”. Four years ago, such views
were offered primarily by Mr Wolfowitz and other neo-cons; these days, the
president and secretary of state are embracing them. Most significantly, the
administration is no longer willing to commit itself to the same ideas for a
balance of power and international stability that it embraced in 2002. That
is a conceptual change of breathtaking magnitude.

The writer, author of Rise of the ­Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War
Cabinet (Viking/Penguin 2004), is author-in-residence at John Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
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