Institutionalizing a Mess is not the Same as Fixing it
Opinion: It’s Still George Bush’s World – AOL News
Even more than a year after his inauguration, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy agenda is still largely devoted to fixing the messes he inherited from Bush. And that’s likely to continue to be the case for quite some time to come, unless Obama makes a more fundamental break with the failed policies of his predecessor.
I think Michael Cohen is being overly generous to Obama in this column. The reality is that Obama is not “largely devoted to fixing the messes he inherited from Bush.” Obama did indeed promise that is what he would do once in office, but the reality is that Obama is not so much fixing the messes as he is institutionalizing them.
I’ve hammered on this point many times in the past, most notable here: Bernard I. Finel: The Victory of the Neoconservatives, where I concluded:
Obama’s apparent diagnosis of Bush’s foreign policy is not that it was wrongheaded — imperialistic and unachievable — but rather that it was implemented incompetently. Now with better public diplomacy and a retooled military, the policy of remaking the world in our own image — at the point of a gun if necessary — can proceed apace.
Largely for political reasons, this continuity tends to get ignored. Good liberals like Cohen, eager to identify the best in Obama, tend to see Obama as trapped by the legacy of past mistakes. That in short, Obama really wants to get away from a Bush-style foreign policy, but just can’t due to GOP obstructionism on things like Guantanamo and contingent challenges like the worsening situation in Afghanistan in early 2009. Conservatives, by contrast, are mostly looking to score points by making Obama seem sort on terrorism and naive.
But the reality is that there is probably more continuity between the Bush foreign policy and Obama’s foreign policy than we have seen since Nixon transitioned to Ford. If you really walk through systematically all the presidential transitions since 1952, the level of continuity between Bush and Obama is quite exceptional. The only other really close case might be Reagan to Bush (41), but heck Bush was Reagan’s VP. Consider by contrast past party switches — Truman to Eisenhower, Eisenhower to Kennedy, Johnson to Nixon, Ford to Carter, Carter to Reagan, Bush (41) to Clinton, Clinton to Bush (43) — I think one can make a quite compelling case that the continuity between Bush and Obama has been stronger than in any of those past cases.
Sure, there are some differences. The Russia policy “reset” may yet turn out to be significant. But where are the other differences? We need to consider some of the key areas of foreign policy:
Afghanistan — a major escalation, but one using Bush’s favored generals and a doctrine of military occupation and societal transformation. Indeed, Obama didn’t even wait for his reviews on Afghanistan to be complete before he loaded the dice by firing Gen. McKiernan and appointing Petraeus protege Gen. McChrystal in his place to bring an Iraq-style surge to Afghanistan.
Defense policy — Obama retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense (!), and has allowed strategic planning in the Department, including the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to be built on Bush’s 2008 National Defense Strategy. No surprise that in broad outlines the department is continuing in the direction set in the late Bush Administration.
War on terror — A change in terminology, true. But in terms of policy, we’ve seen almost complete continuity. Obama has escalated airstrikes in Pakistan, but even that was just building on a trend from the end of the Bush Administration.
Civil-Military relations — Obama has continued the Bush direction of turning much of the national security establishment over to retired military officers. Retired Admiral Dennis Blair is Director of National Intelligence. Gen. James Jones is National Security Advisor. Retired General Karl Eikenberry is U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. He’s allowed Gen. Stanley McChrystal to intervene in the policy process at numerous points — from the creation of a lobbying effort in the United States (his “strategic assessment” team) to open criticism of the Vice President.
Rule of law — Obama has essentially ruled out holding anyone accountable for numerous violations of U.S. law under the Bush Administration. And Obama continues to claim the power to detain individuals indefinitely without charge and to order targeted killings with no transparency or recourse.
On several of these issues, Obama could have affirmatively chosen to break with his predecessor without needing any additional funding or authorities from Congress. Obama isn’t trapped by Bush’s policies, he has chosen instead to endorse a surprisingly large number of them. Now it is possible that Bush’s policies are indeed wiser than many of us thought or realized at the time, but let’s not let Obama off the hook. Whether we like it or not, a bloated defense budget, an imperial world view, and the accretion of executive power are not just legacies of President George W. Bush, but rather are the essence of Obama’s foreign policy orientation.
