Boston Globe "Foreign policy realism" with Condole

rkerver

I'm posting the entirety of a Boston Globe Editorial here as I believe it has relevance.

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Foreign policy realism

October 9, 2005

QUIETLY, THE Bush administration is abandoning many premises and practices that defined its first-term conduct of foreign policy. On one issue after another, President Bush has permitted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to navigate the slow-turning ship of state away from the unilateralist course set by doctrinal neoconservatives during the first term and back toward a multilateral pragmatism like that of Rice's first mentor, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and his mentor, Henry Kissinger.

This is the foreign policy of what some call the realist school. It may not be more humanitarian or peaceful than the statecraft of neoconservatives. But the realists are more prudent, more worldly, more fearful of intervening abroad to remold despotic or failed states. They set great store on cooperating with allies and pursuing American interests through international treaties and organizations.

At her Senate confirmation hearing last January, Rice telegraphed an intention to revive the realist tradition by paying tribute to the ''visionary leaders" of the mid-20th century who ''helped to establish the United Nations and created the international legal framework for this and other institutions that have served the world well for more than 50 years." Unlike her realist predecessor Colin Powell, Rice and her team of professional diplomats have a policymaking role, and the resulting policies regarding Iran, North Korea, and the UN are not merely a little different from those pursued during the first Bush term; they are often antithetical.

Realists tend to abhor the go-it-alone swashbuckling of right-wingers who scorn the United Nations and have made the United States seem like a petulant, paranoid superpower thanks to their rejection of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. By contrast, realists understand that as hard as it may be to act in concert with allies to stop a nasty regime like Iran's from developing nuclear weapons, it is infinitely harder to do so without allies.

The unacknowledged course correction in foreign policy is better late than never. One reason it is not being acknowledged is that some of the promoters of the discredited lone ranger approach, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are still at their posts. Another reason is that it would be harder for Bush to reverse course if he also had to concede, overtly, that many of his initial forays into foreign policy led to dead ends or incipient disasters.

In his first term, for example, Bush's approach to North Korea's nuclear weapons programs was rooted in contempt for anything that might resemble the 1994 Framework Agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. There was no chance to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons and fissile material as long as Cheney and company were able to persuade Bush that to negotiate a deal with Pyongyang would be to reward bad behavior. And with Cheney's protege, John Bolton -- who was then in charge of arms control and disarmament at the State Department -- hovering over six-party talks in Beijing and making certain that no credible US incentives for a deal were presented to the North's negotiators, no such deal was possible. Instead, Pyongyang went on reprocessing plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons while US officials made derogatory statements about North Korea's ''Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il that seemed calculated to keep North Korea away from the bargaining table.

In the last few months, however, there has been a dramatic, if tacit, turnabout. With Ambassador Christopher Hill, a veteran of the Dayton negotiations that ended the Bosnian-Serb war, conducting talks with a North Korean counterpart in Beijing, an agreement on principles was reached in September. There is certain to be a lot of hard bargaining ahead, but with Rice calling the shots instead of Cheney and with Bolton shunted to the United Nations, where he is out of position to block negotiations, it may now be possible to strike a pragmatic deal with Pyongyang.

Such a deal would, to some degree, reward the North's bad behavior and replicate the 1994 Clinton agreement with the North. And in accepting the need to offer Pyongyang security assurances, normalized relations, and economic benefits for dismantling its nuclear programs, the Bush administration is belatedly heeding the counsel of its allies South Korea and Japan and its crucial commercial partner, China.

A similar decision to work with allies explains Washington's support for the diplomatic efforts of Britain, France, and Germany to persuade Iran to relent on its drive to enrich uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons. Last February, Bush met in Germany with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the French president, Jacques Chirac, received their assurance that they will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran, and agreed to cooperate in their pursuit of a negotiated deal with Tehran.

The Europeans' diplomacy may not stop Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, but Bush's assent to it reflects Rice's sage aim of repairing a trans-Atlantic alliance that was badly frayed during the run-up to the 2003 invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power.

No less indicative of a turn toward realism was the decision not to veto a UN resolution last spring that called for officials of Sudan to be tried by the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The administration had previously sought to undermine the court in ways that roused indignation around the world.

When Rice told senators during her confirmation hearings that now is a time for diplomacy, she was not indulging in an idle platitude. She was foreshadowing an effort to undo the damage done to US interests by ideologues of unilateralism. She could just as well have said the time for hubris is over.

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3259 Location: Maine

That's the first good news we've heard in years about this administration.

MicroHydro · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Apr 10, 2005 Posts: 1286

I don't know why anyone would pay any attention to fmr Chevron exec Rice. All she cares about is having more shoes than Imelda Marcos.
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"The world is changed... I feel it in the water... I feel it in the earth... I smell it in the air... Much that once was, is lost..." - Galadriel

Colorado-Valley · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 16, 2004 Posts: 731

Maybe someone was told that the world's biggest debtor nation was about to have the economic rug pulled out from beneath it unless it cooled its jets.

I noticed that both Rice and Bush changed their tune about invading Iran just after meeting with Putin last year. Did he give them the bad news?

Doly · Expert Joined: Dec 03, 2004 Posts: 4035

I had the impression they only stopped dropping hints about Iran with Katrina.

rkerver

Maybe Bush reconsidered those voices he was hearing and instead of God telling him to do it, he discovered it was really the devil, and he's suddenly all repentant like and letting someone with a little foreign policy savvy take over driving for a while.

rogerhb

The Economist from July this year had a wonderful cartoon.

First picture has Condi saying to all these ME leaders that they should embrace democracy.

Second picture shows them all voting that she minds her own business.
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"Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers." - Henry Louis Mencken