Chapter 7

What Next?

American Foreign Policy and the 2004 US Elections

An American Viewpoint

Daniel Sneider

The re-election of George W Bush as President of the United States marks a branching [out] point in the evolution of American foreign policy. It provides a popular, though narrow, endorsement of the policies pursued by the Bush administration since the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. It gives the administration a mandate, though not an unlimited one, to extend and deepen a shift in American policy away from its traditional Cold War-era internationalist roots.

The Bush administration faces numerous challenges and difficult choices immediately in its second term—first fashioning a stable and positive outcome to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but also responding to the proliferation threats from North Korea and Iran. It must attempt to repair relations with traditional allies in Europe while forging partnerships with new emerging aspirants for global power such as China and India. And it still must battle Islamic extremism and counter the threat of a second, mass casualty attack on the United States or its global interests.

How will the election victory and its apparent mandate influence the response to these challenges? The answer is by no means clear. Several schools of foreign policy thinking continue to vie for influence on the President himself. The resources of the US to exercise power beyond its borders are not unlimited and unanticipated events, as we saw on September 11, can quickly reshape the policy environment.

What is clear is that President Bush himself emerged from the 2004 campaign with a greater sense of certainty about the decisions made following the 9/11 attacks. He has already signaled in his inaugural address, and repeated since, an even greater determination to embrace policies of transformation rather than the traditional goal of global stability.

Before looking ahead, it is important to look at two crucial issues, both of them obscured by widely circulating myths. The first is the nature of the shift in American foreign policy doctrine, often seen as the product of a ‘neo-conservative’ takeover. The second is the analysis of what motivated American voters to re-elect President Bush—the belief that the 2004 vote was an embrace of conservative ‘moral values.’

The Myth of the Neo-conservative Takeover

In the pages of newspapers and magazines from Le Monde to Vanity Fair, the neo conservative takeover in Washington became a hot topic midway through the first term of the Bush administration. Those articles asserted the existence of a tightly linked group, extending from its headquarters at the Pentagon into the White House and other parts of the administration and pursuing an aggressive agenda to remake American foreign policy.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney are often depicted as the leaders of this ‘neocon’ cabal. Other names prominently mentioned include Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz and State Department arms control Chief John Bolton.

As an intellectual movement, the neocons offered a coherent vision of America’s role in the world that helped shape the response to 9/11. But their triumph in Washington has been overdrawn. That is partly the result of confusion about who the neoconservatives are and what they believe. The term is often mistakenly used to conflate what are in fact two very different groups of policy-makers who allied to shape the policies of the Bush administration. The neocons are radicals within the traditions of American foreign policy. They believe in using power to remake the world in America’s image. In many ways, their ideas draw most upon a Democratic president often derided by Republicans: Woodrow Wilson, who thought the best way of securing peace after World War I was to spread democracy. Unlike Wilson, however, the neocons reject the importance of global institutions to reach that goal, favouring an unencumbered exercise of American dominance, even empire.

Men like Rumsfeld and Cheney, who have been closely linked since Ford administration, have not historically shared this radical agenda of promoting democratic transformation. Rather they are what Ivo Daalder, co-author of ‘America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy,’ dubbed ‘assertive nationalists.’ Their focus has been on a willingness to wield power, sometimes preemptively and unilaterally, to destroy those who threaten American security.

The nationalists are part of a broad spectrum in American foreign policy that some label ‘realists.’ Unlike the neocons, they often put traditional concepts of balance of power and national interest ahead of the promotion of democratic changes.

‘Rumsfeld and Cheney are basically realists,’ says Robert Kagan, a foreign-policy writer who is considered one of the key formulators of neocon thinking (although he eschews that label). ‘There are times when realists go along with a Wilsonian flow, as some did during the Reagan era. But they don’t have a philosophical commitment to nation building.’

But in the Bush administration, the nationalists and the neocons have been allied around a belief in the readiness to use American military power and in their disdain for international institutions. This alliance was also formed around a shared opposition to another group of ‘realists’—traditional Republican internationalists, represented within the administration by Secretary of State Colin Powel. The internationalists argued persistently in favour of working through alliances to respond to the challenge of 9/11, a greater emphasis on the importance of diplomacy over the use of force, and less enthusiasm for the language of a crusade to alter the global status quo.

The internationalists, who also dominate the Democratic Party, are part of the traditional centre of American foreign policy. Their views have long been represented in the Republican Party by Henry Kissinger, whom both liberals and neocons assail for his readiness to support dictatorships, whether in Saigon or Riyadh, if they serve American interests.

‘You usually don’t see Republicans talk in any terms other than realpolitik,’ says Victor David Hanson, a neocon thinker and author. The soft-spoken professor derides what he calls ‘byzantine, balance-of-power, support-the-Saudi-sheiks policies.’

The neocons were vaulted into a much greater role, however, by the events of September 11th. Prior to that, the neocons were certainly influential, but hardly powerful.

‘They think of themselves as a radical fringe group that suddenly, because of September 11, is in the mainstream,’ says Stanford political scientist Michael McFaul. ‘They never in their wildest dreams thought they would be as well positioned as they are now.’

The neocon rise is due, in large part, to something that is rare in American political life: the power of ideas. In their case, it is the intersection between a shattering event, which challenged traditional ideas about foreign policy and national security, and the sweep of neocon ideas, which offered a powerful answer to that challenge.

The neocon label was originally penned to describe a group of former leftists turned conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s. Their conversion was largely shaped by their views on social policy. They were ardent supporters of meritocracy over the welfare state, opponents of liberal multiculturalism, passionate about the superiority of Western civilisation. And they saw the Democratic Party, which most of them were part of, as having been taken over by its left wing, typified by George McGovern’s presidential candidacy in 1972.

Some were inspired by the writings of University of Chicago classicist Leo Strauss, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who argued that it was the weakness of liberals in the face of evil that led to the triumph of fascism.

Many saw this lesson repeated during the Cold War, criticising the detente policies of Kissinger and advocating confrontation with the Soviet Union. Two neocons prominent in this administration—Wolfowitz and Richard Perle—began their careers as aides to Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington who was a fierce critic of detente.

The imagery of Munich, appeasement in the face of fascism was combined later with the belief that the Vietnam War could have been won in military terms. ‘Vietnam itself was a defeat,’ writes Hanson, ‘but this was largely due to politics.’ In the neocon view, the wrong lessons were taken from the Vietnam experience—a reluctance to use force and a fear of taking casualties. Some of the neocons ended up as second-level officials in the Reagan administration—among them Wolfowitz, Perle and Kristol. They were ardent supporters of Reagan’s verbal assault on the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’. They believed that his massive defence buildup triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But neoconservatives were dismayed by George W Bush’s return to traditional balance-of-power policies, typified by his embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Bush’s backing for the continuation of Soviet rule over rebellious republics. The most painful moment was when Bush and Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided at the end of the Persian Gulf War not to march to Baghdad, preferring to maintain the international coalition pieced together to prosecute that war.

For Wolfowitz, who was serving as undersecretary of defence, this was a tragic error, leaving intact a deadly enemy who would threaten US interests in a vital region.

The neocons summed up the lessons they had learned in a seminal article in Foreign Affairs, penned by William Kristol and Kagan during the 1996 election campaign, calling for a return to a ‘Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.’ They accused conservatives of being ‘adrift’ and failing to offer a clear alternative to Clinton. (They strongly supported Clinton’s decision to send troops into the Balkan conflict, but had little use for what they saw as his multilateralism.) The article rejected in the strongest terms the isolationists led by Pat Buchanan, who mounted a serious challenge for the Republican presidential nomination. The authors called, instead, for global intervention. Authors were also critical of traditional Republican internationalists such as Powell, pointing to the aborted victory in Gulf War as evidence of the danger of relying too much on alliances and organisations such as the United Nations. The United States should instead, they wrote, seek ‘benevolent global hegemony,’ unafraid to exercise the strategic and ideological predominance it enjoyed after winning the Cold War.

Kristol and Kagan did find some common ground with conservative nationalists. They shared the demand for a reversal of post-Cold War defence cutbacks and argued for increasing spending to make the military more mobile and more lethal with the use of precision weapons, and thus more able to flex its muscles globally. They sharply parted company with this group in insisting that power had to be accompanied by a sense of ‘moral clarity,’ a Wilsonian-style crusade to spread the American system.

The administration of George W Bush came into office with a view on national security shaped heavily by distaste for its predecessor’s. Bush and his closest advisers, including Condoleezza Rice, disdained Clinton for squandering American military resources on humanitarian aid and ‘nation building.’ They also were critical of his weakness when confronted with ‘rogue’ states and terrorist attacks, beginning in Somalia in 1993 and continuing through a series of incidents culminating in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the Iraqi decision to throw out UN inspectors that same year. (That view conveniently ignores other precedents, such as the Reagan administration’s hasty retreat from Lebanon after the terrorist bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Marines.)

When the dramatic attacks of September 11 took place, Bush officials were convinced that it was this history of unanswered attacks, this reluctance to ‘put boots on the ground,’ that gave Al-Qaeda the encouragement to carry out this bold assault. They were worried that now the United States faced a national security threat that was comparable to the days of the Cold War. This time it was in the form of Islamist radicals who sought weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear or biological weapons and, if they got them, would be undeterred from using them.

In the immediate wake of September 11, the neo conservatives offered a broad doctrine to meet this threat—combining the readiness to use military force with a campaign to counter Islamist terrorists by spreading the American model of democracy throughout the Islamic world. They called for a rollback of ‘rogue’ states that provide safe haven and possibly weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

Wolfowitz wanted to head right away to Iraq, but he and fellow neocons settled for removing the Al-Qaeda protectorate in Afghanistan first. The marriage of might and moral certitude was accompanied by a belief in American dominance that dismissed the need to patiently build a gulf war-type international consensus. Although Cheney and Rumsfeld did not necessarily agree with the idea of sowing democracy in the Islamic world, there was a practical convergence on the need for ‘regime change’ in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In a little-noticed speech in April 2002, then State Department policy-planning chief Richard Haass offered a very different vision of American foreign policy—a call for the United States to pursue a doctrine of global integration. ‘We have demonstrated that we can and will act alone when necessary,’ Haass said. ‘By the same token, we do not take lightly the costs to ourselves and to others when we forgo participation in some multilateral initiative.’

Powell and the internationalists were able to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations before attacking Iraq, but they ultimately lost the larger battle over foreign policy to their ideological foes inside the administration. The President’s national security strategy promulgated in September 2002 emphatically embraces the vision of global transformation, along with the pre-emptive military doctrine pushed by the conservative nationalists. The administration believes that if the United States uses military force in Afghanistan and Iraq, other nations such as Iran or North Korea will yield. ‘They believe that big-stick diplomacy leads to bandwagoning,’ says John Mearsheimer, considered the dean of realist thinkers. ‘They believe this is especially true in the Arab and Islamic world, where they believe people respect one thing—the mailed fist.’

He and other realists argue that such policies will instead propel nations to band together against the United States and rush to acquire nuclear weapons to balance American military dominance. Ultimately, American domination, however benign, will only encourage resistance. ‘All empires are on the scrap heap of history—what undid them all? Nationalism,’ Mearsheimer warns.

The Bush administration, and the President himself, very clearly rejected that realist critique. The decision to invade Iraq was a branching point. Battles over Iraq policy during and after the invasion pitted the different elements of the administration against each other. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, where internationalist/realist views were more deeply entrenched, favoured an approach in Iraq aimed more at creating stability than at establishing democracy. Privately, officials from both agencies blame the Pentagon, and its civilian leadership, for mistakes that deepened the insurgency.

Public unease with the Iraq war and the apparently unanticipated and unending insurgency that ensued grew rapidly from the summer of 2003. The failure to find evidence of an active programme to produce weapons of mass destruction, much less actual weapons, also shook support. The Bush administration was perhaps encouraged by these developments to even more fully embrace the neo conservative ideas of democratic transformation of the Middle East and the cause of liberating the Iraqi people from the Baath dictatorship. And the President’s re-election campaign centred on the central contention that the war was an extension of the broader war on terror and the need to confront extremism in the Muslim world. Largely, the 2004 election turned on this issue and the underlying judgment about the wartime leadership of President Bush.

The 2004 Election and the Mandate

In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 US election, many analysts seized upon some early data to analyse the election victory of President Bush over his Democratic Party challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. According to this view, the election was settled not on the issues of foreign policy and national security, as many had believed it would be, but on domestic issues such as gay marriage rights and abortion. Those who embraced this view cited the answer given in the exit poll of voters conducted by the major television networks. The poll asked voters what was the most important issue in the election. Of the seven possible answers given, the largest per centage–22 per cent—chose ‘moral values.’

Along with this polling data, analysts pointed to the success of Republican strategist Karl Rove in turning out larger numbers of rural and suburban voters in key states such as Ohio and Florida. Those voters were largely white and members of Christian evangelical churches and were said to be motivated more by domestic issues and by moral values than by the war in Iraq. Polling data showed that voters who consider themselves to be religious and who attend church on a regular basis voted by a large majority for Bush. The evidence from the exit polls presents a far more complicated picture than this data initially suggested. Most voters favoured abortion rights, about the same per centage as in 2000. Some 60 per cent supported some form of legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Bush’s backing went up about equally among both churchgoers and non-churchgoers compared to 2000.

Rather than religion and morality, the 2004 election was about leadership at a time of war. The network exit poll showed that the dominant issue in this election was the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Together, those two issues were named as the most important issue by 34 per cent of the voters. Exit polls showed 52 per cent approved the decision to go to war, even though the same per centage thought the war was going badly. A slightly larger per centage—55 per cent—believed the war was part of the war on terrorism.

Those two groups of voters—those who favored the war and thought it was part of the war on terror—voted by a large margin, over 80 per cent, in favour of Bush. Fearful and angry, Americans were reluctant to change leaders in the midst of conflict. And historically the American people have never thrown out an incumbent president during wartime, even when he was unpopular—Lincoln and Roosevelt are good examples of that.

More crucially, Bush was able to successfully present himself as a strong leader with unwavering views. At the same time, he successfully painted his opponent, John Kerry, as weak and indecisive, someone who could not be trusted to lead the country at a time of war. The polling numbers again back this up. About one third of the electorate identified strong leadership and taking clear stands on issues as the most important quality for a president. Of those voters, more than 80 per cent voted for Bush. When voters were asked if they trusted Kerry to handle terrorism, only 40 per cent said yes, compared to 58 per cent who trusted Bush.

A deeper look into the attitudes of American voters reveals that Bush’s victory was largely due to the administration’s success in implanting certain beliefs among a narrow majority of the American people. A poll issued on Oct 21, 2004, just a couple of weeks before the election by the Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, asserted the existence of what it called ‘The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters.’

Supporters of President Bush overwhelmingly believed, according to the poll, that Iraq had actual Weapons of Mass Destruction (47 per cent) or a major programme for developing them (25 per cent), despite the issuance of a report by the Iraq survey team headed by Charles Duelfer to Congress that neither assertion was true. In contrast, Kerry supporters held opposite beliefs on both these points, in accord with the Duelfer findings. Similarly, 75 per cent of the Bush supporters polled believed that Iraq was providing significant support to Al-Qaeda and that evidence of this had been found. A majority believed that the 9/11 Commission had concluded this as well. In reality, the Commission found no evidence of such a linkage. Again, Kerry supporters had opposite views, in line with the Commission findings.

These separate realities, the poll found, extend beyond just the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. Despite abundant evidence—including extensive published polls—that the vast majority of the world opposed the war, only a third of Bush supporters recognised this fact. The rest assumed that the world either supported the war or was evenly divided. Among the Kerry voters, almost three-quarters understood the majority of world opinion was against the US invasion.

These misperceptions extend to other areas—a majority of Bush supporters thought a majority of the world favoured Bush’s re-election. And interestingly, majorities of Bush supporters also thought wrongly that the administration favoured the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Kyoto global warming treaty. Kerry supporters were more accurate on this front as well.

Poll analysts suggest that Bush voters believed these things because, in essence, they believed in the President himself.

‘The roots of the Bush supporters’ resistance to information very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake,’ wrote PIPA poll director Steven Kull. ‘In response to an unprecedented attack on US soil, with the prospect of further such attacks, Bush responded with a grace and resolve that provided reassurance to an anxious public. In the war with the Taliban he showed restraint as well as effectiveness. Large numbers of Americans had a powerful bonding experience with the president—a bond that they may be loath to relinquish,’ he wrote just weeks before the vote.

‘This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters—and an idealised image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters.’

Karl Rove, the chief strategist, understood this appeal—and its utility in undermining the Democratic Party—almost immediately. In a speech to the Republican National Committee in January, 2002, he argued that the party could ‘go to the country on this issue, because [Americans] trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.’

The Republican victory in the 2002-midterm elections was largely credited to the success of this approach. Democratic Party strategists also grasped this lesson and were eager to find a presidential candidate in 2004 that could be credible on national security issues. The upsurge in favour of Howard Dean, the anti-war candidate, surprised the party leadership. That leadership ultimately rallied around the candidacy of Sen. Kerry in large part because they hoped his combat record in Vietnam would make him less vulnerable to the Republican national security appeal.

But Sen. Kerry’s record on the war issues itself reflected the divided views within the Democratic Party. Kerry had voted to authorise the Iraq war in October 2002. But when the Dean grassroots upsurge shook the race, Kerry voted against the supplemental funding for that war. His convoluted explanation that he had voted for the funding legislation before he voted against it became a staple of Republican ads almost immediately.

Indeed, from the moment that it became clear that Kerry was going to win the nomination, the Republicans launched a remarkably effective and disciplined attack campaign of television advertising and public statements. The campaign depicted Kerry as a ‘flip flopper,’ a politician who shifted his views to what is popular and lacked the clear and consistent values of President Bush. By the end of the summer, that image was deeply embedded in the public mind, as shown in polling.

Kerry attempted to counter the Republicans by selling his life story—a very compelling tale of a man who, unlike Bush, volunteered to fight in the Vietnam war and performed with great personal courage in that war. This was a story that Democratic strategists thought would allow them to sell Kerry as a wartime leader and counter the President’s natural advantage on that crucial issue.

The Kerry effort was briefly successful. But it did not survive a relentless assault, apparently closely coordinated with the Republican campaign, on Kerry’s wartime record. The polling lead for Kerry built up out of the late July Democratic convention was wiped out in August by a campaign carried about by a group of Vietnam veterans led by a long-time foe of Kerry. The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claimed—later shown to be largely untrue—Kerry was a coward who received medals he didn’t deserve, and who betrayed his comrades by later opposing the war.

Kerry recovered some ground in the two months that followed, but he never could shook off the doubts created about his personal leadership.

‘I think it was a triumph of persona over policy,’ said Senator Bob Graham, a longtime Florida Democrat who just stepped down from his seat in a failed attempt to gain the presidential nomination. ‘People just felt more comfortable with President Bush than they did with Senator Kerry. President Bush was able to convey a sense of strength, leadership and purposefulness as it relates to the war on terror, and the war in Iraq.’

This suggests that Bush’s narrow majority of 2 per cent of the popular vote (Reagan, in contrast, won a second term in 1984 by 18 per cent) is less an endorsement of policy than a vote of confidence in leadership. The war in Iraq greatly undermined that confidence, though not sufficiently to bar re-election. Opinion in the second term can shift again if events further damage that sense of confidence.

What Next in a Bush Second Term Presidency?

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made clear from their opening post-election statements that they consider the vote to be a strong mandate for them to pursue their policies across a broad spectrum of issues. In addition to narrowly but clearly winning the presidential popular vote and Electoral College vote, the Republicans gained seats in the Senate and the House.

Leaving aside the issues of domestic policy that are likely to occupy a great deal of attention—nominees for the Supreme Court, Social Security, and taxes—what does this mean for foreign policy?

Analysts following the election offered two views. One was that Bush, freed from the pressures of seeking re-election, will feel less need to cater to his more conservative base and will shift toward a more centrist approach. According to this view, the drain on military and fiscal resources from the Iraq war would force the administration in this direction.

This view resembles those who believed that Bush, upon election in 2000, would rule largely in the manner of his father, who hailed from the realist, internationalist wing of the Republican Party. The assumption then was that the disputed nature of his victory in 2000 would force Bush to rule as a moderate in order to gain legitimacy. Bush defied those expectations almost completely.

The other view is that a second term Bush administration will move even more strongly, with less hesitation, to implement the policies shaped by the combination of neo conservative transformation and assertive nationalism that formed during the first term. In this view, Bush and Cheney read the election result as a validation of the national security strategy laid out in 2002 and pursued in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The President’s public statements, most prominently his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech, provide strong evidence that the latter view is closer to the truth. If anything, President Bush seems to have decided to embrace even more strongly the broad evocative goal of promoting transformation of the Middle East as a means of responding to the rise of radical Islamist movements.

As the President declared at his inauguration:

‘It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.’

The speech invoked a broad doctrine of promoting ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ as the goal of American policy. Foreign policy analyst James Lindsay, co-author of America Unbound, called it a ‘second’ Bush Doctrine. The first, articulated after 9/11, was the idea that the United States would punish terrorists and any country that harbored or supported them, he said in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As practical policy, this second doctrine is strongly rejected by traditional internationalists in the foreign policy establishment.

‘Promoting democracy can… be useful as one component of the campaign against terrorism,’ wrote former Bush State Department official Richard Haass in the Washington Post after the speech. ‘But there are more reasons to conclude that it is neither desirable nor practical to make democracy promotion the dominant feature of American foreign policy. The bottom line is that while the nature of other societies should always be a foreign policy consideration, it cannot and should not always be the foreign policy priority.’

Haass, who now is President of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued, for example, that if the theocratic regime in Iran were to be overthrown, as the administration has clearly indicated it would support, ‘it is almost certain that free Iranians would be as enthusiastic as the mullahs are about possessing nuclear weapons, owing to the political popularity of these weapons and their strategic rationale given Iran’s neighborhood.’

The White House and the President himself, partly in response to such criticism, clarified that the United States is not going to challenge authoritarian rule all across the world. But the new doctrine provides a powerful justification for action, along with responding to the threats posed by development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This was evident early in the rise of tensions with Iran and Syria.

As in the first term, however, different views on how to carry out these policy goals will continue to be offered within the administration. The second term reshuffle of senior cabinet and other positions left Defence Secretary Rumsfeld in place while removing Secretary Powell.

But the shift of national security advisor Rice over to the State Department has created some hope that she will fill the role played by Powell as a representative of realist, internationalist views within the administration.

At this writing, the administration is already grappling with serious challenges in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, challenges that may require again making difficult choices about the balance between diplomacy and the use of force and between acting through alliances or unilaterally. How those choices will ultimately be made cannot be predicted. But if the first term and the 2004 election campaign provide any guide to the future, it would be unwise not to take President Bush at his word.