international law

Daalder and Lindsay argue that George W. Bush has revolutionized U.S. foreign policy and that his revolution rests on two premises: the world is a dangerous place in which alliances and treaties hold back U.S. power and the U.S. must use that unfettered power to change the status quo of international relations. This revolution preceded 9-11, the authors claim, rather than was caused by it. The terrorist attacks in the United States simply reinforced a strong tendency already evident in the Bush administration.

I expected better evidence and more solid arguments from a book which claims Bush, rather than 9-11, revolutionized U.S. foreign policy. The pre-9-11 unilateral foreign policy decisions made by Bush that are cited here (withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM Treaty, for example) can hardly be considered revolutionary given the strong support for such moves during the Clinton administration among conservative intellectuals and Republican congressmen and senators. Bush's most controversial foreign policy doctrine to date - pre-emptive war - came after 9-11 and whatever plans Bush may or may not have had for Saddam's Iraq prior to the terrorist attacks, nothing would have come of them without hijacked airliners crashing into New York City skyscrapers and the Pentagon.

Other arguments made in the book also do not point to a revolutionary foreign policy. Bush's strong moral language of good and evil when discussing foreign policy, for example, may be unfamiliar to foreign audiences and can be debated on its own terms, but it is of an accord with a not uncommon tendency in American foreign policy that can be found in the speeches of Ronald Reagan, John Foster Dulles, and Woodrow Wilson. Even John F Kennedy's inaugural spoke of foreign policy in grandiose and stark terms such as "twilight struggle" between Communism and the West and "supporting any friend and opposing any foe".

Daalder and Lindsay's thesis begs for some historical perspective, but beyond a rough sketch, they rarely provide it. They're content to look at Bush's foreign policy on its own terms, or in contrast to the foreign policy of his immediate successor, and then judge it revolutionary. They admit that foreign policy was not a priority when Bush came to office, and that 9-11 transformed the views of his administration in some ways, but they don't connect the dots. It was not Bush that revolutionized U.S. foreign policy; it was 9-11 that revolutionized Bush's foreign policy. The monumental project of nation-building currently underway in Iraq is proof of that.

Two Clinton-era National Security Council staffers offer muted criticism of George W. Bush's foreign policy from a realist perspective. September 11th is identified as the reason for Congressional deference to Bush's "revolutionary" tangent as Bush proceeded to wage war on Afghanistan and Iraq, unleash the CIA from previous legal constraints, and generally pursue a "hegemonist" worldview in foreign affairs. Not unexpectedly, they would prefer the multilateral approach towards exercising American power that has largely prevailed over the past five decades.

While obviously opposed to the Bush approach to foreign policy in general and to Iraq in particular, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay have nonetheless succeeded in producing a remarkably fair book attempting to explain the reasons behind the President's about face from recent U.S. foreign policy. The attacks on 9/11 and other terrorist activities over the past decade had gradually convinced the President that the internationalist view espoused by Bill Clinton and his own father was simply no longer the answer. Bush has chosen instead to embark on a new unilateralist course favored by most of his senior advisors that the authors argue may be somewhat productive in the short run but likely to be a disaster over the long haul. Extremely well written, thoughtful and meticulously documented, this book should be an essential read for any citizen seeking to get up to speed on foreign policy issues before the 2004 Presidential election.