George W. Bush -- grand strategist

[Tigermike 3,657]

George W. Bush -- grand strategist

Tony Blankley

February 11, 2004

The Boston Globe -- the respected, liberal newspaper owned by the New York Times -- ran an article last week that Bush critics might wish to read carefully. It is a report on a new book that argues that President Bush has developed and is ably implementing only the third American grand strategy in our history.

The author of this book, "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" (Harvard Press), which is to be released in March, is John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University. The Boston Globe describes Professor Gaddis as "the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians." In other words, this is not some put up job by an obscure right-wing author. This comes from the pinnacle of the liberal Ivy League academic establishment.

If you hate George W. Bush, you will hate this Boston Globe story, because it makes a strong case that George Bush stands in a select category with Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James Monroe (as guided by his secretary of state, John Q. Adams) in implementing one of the only three grand strategies of American foreign policy in our two-century history.

As the Globe article describes, in reporting on the book and an interview with Professor Gaddis, "Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries of policy."

According to this analysis, the first grand strategy by Monroe/Adams followed the British invasion of Washington and the burning of the White House in 1814. They responded to that threat by developing a policy of gaining future security through territorial expansion -- filling power vacuums with American pioneers before hostile powers could get in. That strategy lasted throughout the 19th and the early 20th centuries, and accounts for our continental size and historic security.

FDR's plans for the post WWII period was the second grand strategy, and gained American security by establishing free markets and self determination in Europe as a safeguard against future European wars, while creating the United Nations and related agencies to help us manage the rest of the world and contain the Soviets. The end of the Cold War changed that and led, according to Professor Gaddis, to President Clinton's assumption that a new grand strategy was not needed because globalization and democratization were inevitable. "Clinton said as much at one point. I think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch," Professor Gaddis observed.

That brings the professor to George W. Bush, who he describes as undergoing "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V." Clearly, Professor Gaddis has not been a longtime admirer of George Bush. But he is now.

He observes that Bush "undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his doctrine's center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded international system that was really nothing more than a snapshot of the configuration of power that existed in 1945."

It is worth noting that John Kerry and the other Democrats' central criticism of President Bush -- the prosaic argument that he should have taken no action without U.N. approval -- is implicitly rejected by Professor Gaddis as being a proposed policy that would be constrained by an "outmoded international system."

In assessing Bush's progress to date, The Boston Globe article quotes Professor Gaddis: "so far the military action in Iraq has produced a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates. The United States has emerged as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001."

In another recent article, written before the Iraqi war, Professor Gaddis wrote that: "(Bush's) grand strategy is actually looking toward the culmination of the Wilsonian project of a world safe for Democracy, even in the Middle East. And this long-term dimension of it, it seems to me, goes beyond what we've seen in the thinking of more recent administrations. It is more characteristic of the kind of thinking, say, that the Truman administration was doing at the beginning of the Cold War ... "

Is President Bush becoming an historic world leader in the same category as President Franklin Roosevelt, as the eminent Ivy League professor argues? Or is he just a lying nitwit, as the eminent Democratic Party chairman and Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe argues? I suspect that as this election year progresses, that may end up being the decisive debate. You can put me on the side of the professor.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/tonybla...b20040211.shtml

If you are interested in the bok.

http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?id...&pid=0674011740

[Tiger Al 0]

Ha!!! What a joke. Bush isn't any "grand strategist," the Project for the New American Century is.

[Tigermike 3,657]

From the Boston Globe and The NY Times.

A scholar argues that Bush's doctrine of preemption has deep roots in American history

By Laura Secor, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004

EVERY PRESIDENT makes foreign policy. Only a select few, over the sweep of history, design what scholars term grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries, of policy.

Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.

Gaddis knows the latter name may bring a number of his colleagues up short. Critics charge that President Bush is a lightweight, Gaddis laments, and they do so because the president is a generalist who prefers the big picture to its details. Over lunch at Mory's, Yale's tweedy private dining club, Gaddis suggests that academics underrate Bush because they overvalue specialized knowledge. In reality, as his new book asserts, after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush underwent "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V."

The Bush doctrine is more serious and sophisticated than its critics acknowledge -- but it is also less novel, Gaddis maintains. Three of its core principles -- preemptive war, unilateralism, and American hegemony -- actually hark back to the early 19th century, to the time of John Quincy Adams.

. . .

Gaddis begins "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" (Harvard, March) with the observation that thanks to its geographical isolation, the United States has experienced only three surprise attacks on its soil: the British burning of Washington in 1814, Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the terrorist attacks in 2001. Each time, American leaders responded by rethinking grand strategy.

After the British attack on Washington, Gaddis recounts, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state to James Monroe, perceived that weakly governed states along US borders invited dangers, whether from marauding bands of Native Americans, pirates, and escaped slaves in Florida (before General Andrew Jackson invaded it in 1817), or from European powers who might seize vulnerable territories such as California as staging grounds from which to threaten the United States. And so America achieved its security through territorial expansion -- by filling a perceived power vacuum before hostile powers could do so. Gaddis describes the invasions of such territories as "preemptive."

Adams's grand strategy remained in force throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. But its emphasis on preemption and unilateralism (the dictate that the United States had best avoid "entangling alliances") fell by the wayside after World War II. These were not doctrines fitting to the new position the United States occupied in the postwar world -- one where the European powers had been decimated, America possessed a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union, an erstwhile ally, had become a powerful new adversary.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's grand strategy for the postwar era was to secure the United States by securing the world. Free markets and self-determination would safeguard against future European wars. But FDR was also a hardheaded strategist who never intended to relinquish the United States' new hold on power. He imagined that the world's strongest states -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China -- would function as "four policemen" to maintain the peace. The United Nations Security Council made that arrangement, as Gaddis wrote in 1972, "less repugnant to internationalists."

The postwar United States extended its sphere of influence partly through generous economic aid, partly through the alliance system, and largely by the consent of the states in its orbit. So long as the Soviet Union was around, small states always knew that there was something worse than American domination.

The end of the Cold War changed all that -- and found the United States without a grand strategy. President Bill Clinton, says Gaddis, thought that "globalization and democratization were irreversible processes, therefore we didn't need a grand strategy. Clinton said as much at one point. I think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch."

Enter Prince Hal. The Bush administration, marvels Gaddis, undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his doctrine's center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded international system that was really nothing more than a "snapshot of the configuration of power that existed in 1945," Gaddis says.

Despite the dark predictions of critics, Gaddis writes, so far the military action in Iraq has produced "a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia . . .; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates." Indeed, Gaddis writes, the United States has emerged "as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on Sept. 11, 2001."

That's not to say that the Bush administration has behaved flawlessly. Gaddis says, "They don't give enough weight to how frightening it can be if you have that much power and then you deploy it, and you deploy language foolishly." Nonetheless, he stresses, "I do take them very seriously. I do think Bush is in charge himself, and has been very underrated as a leader in all of this just as Ronald Reagan was underrated."

. . .

In defending the soundness and wisdom of a foreign policy vision many academics decry, Gaddis finds himself in a familiar position. He has long taken what is known as the orthodox position in his native field of Cold War studies, arguing that the Soviet Union's rapacious expansionism rendered the Cold War inevitable. Starting as early as the 1950s, revisionist historians, including William Appleman Williams, Walter Lafeber, Gabriel Kolko, and others offered the countervailing view that the United States, too, had something to gain from extending its dominion over half the world: namely, access to markets. And in pursuing such interests, the United States often trod upon legitimate Soviet security concerns.

Gaddis's first book, published in 1972, considered the revisionist perspective but ended by rejecting it. The focus on economic motives for American behavior was reductive, he argued then. And if anything, FDR had overestimated Josef Stalin's goodwill, leading him to respond too weakly to Soviet expansion.

Revisionists bristled at Gaddis's critique, while hardline orthodox historians faulted Gaddis for speculating, at the book's end, that "leaders of both superpowers sought peace, but in doing so yielded to considerations which . . . made a resolution of differences impossible."

When the end of the Cold War opened up a trove of new documents from the Eastern bloc, Gaddis found himself reevaluating such conclusions. He repudiated his earlier assumption, typical of the "realist" school of political science, that the internal nature of states had little effect on how they behaved in the world. "I think that's dead wrong, in the light of new evidence," he says today.

In his 1997 book "We Now Know," Gaddis argued that the Cold War emanated from the very nature of the Soviet Union: from the way it coerced satellite states into its orbit; from its brittle, inflexible alliances; from Stalin's paranoid and confrontational personality; from the "geriatric over-exertion" of aging Kremlin bureaucrats who fancied themselves great friends of Latin American revolutionaries; and from genuine ideological romanticism that blinded Soviet leaders to their own interests.

Meanwhile, Gaddis recounted, American-style democracy proved magnetic. The United States dominated its sphere by consent and established enduring alliances the Soviets hadn't foreseen.

Hailed as "brilliant" by reviewer David Hendrickson in Foreign Affairs, "We Now Know" also met with criticism among Cold War historians who felt Gaddis had overreached. (One reviewer said the book would've been more aptly titled "What I Now Think.") The documents, after all, were still pouring out, many of them untranslated.

. . .

If feelings ran strong about the Cold War in `97, Gaddis can expect an even more intense response to his defense of the Bush doctrine.

Is the sort of 19th-century preemption Gaddis describes really comparable to the Bush policies of today? Bard College historian James Chace, author of an acclaimed biography of Dean Acheson, suggests that the 19th-century wars of expansion are only loosely classifiable as preemption. A more apposite comparison to the Bush policies would be President Woodrow Wilson's incursions into Mexico in 1914 and `16, when Mexican revolutionaries were breaching the US border. Wilson sought to teach the Mexicans to "elect good men" -- in other words, he hoped to effect regime change. The project failed.

Chace notes that the United States explicitly rejected striking preemptively both times it was considered during the Cold War: when the Soviets first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis in `62. In the latter case it was decided, recalls Chace, that "we just don't do that."

Gaddis agrees that preemption was considered uncivilized during the Cold War. But today, the United States enjoys unchallenged global supremacy. Policies that were risky when the Soviets were around are now thinkable.

According to Gaddis, then, the big innovations of the Bush doctrine are the ones most reminiscent of the 19th century: Bush has revived preemption and backed away from institutional alliance structures. Everything old is new again.

Or not quite. What is perhaps most important about the Bush doctrine is also very specific to its era, says Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming "Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk" (Knopf, April): It shifts the geographical center of American strategy.

"The Cold War was fundamentally about Europe," says Mead. "Whatever happened anywhere in the world, the basic question was how it would affect the standoff with the Soviets in Europe. Now the Bush people are saying that whatever happens anywhere in the world, the question is, how will it affect the Middle East and the war on terror?"

In putting so much emphasis on what's old in the Bush doctrine, does Gaddis risk losing sight of what's new? Historical analogies, after all, can obscure as much as they illuminate. So it seems when I ask Gaddis why, if democratization is central to the Bush doctrine, the administration failed to plan for the occupation and transition to democratic sovereignty in Iraq.

That's "not surprising," says Gaddis insouciantly. After all, he notes, the reconstruction efforts in Japan and Germany were badly planned as well.

Laura Secor is the staff writer for Ideas

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/art...and_old_policy/

[Tiger Al 0]

Yeah, whatever. Read PNAC, look at its' members (At least five or six of them are in his administration) and reflect on his presidency so far. I was chalking it all up to mere coincidence until he started talking about going to the moon and to Mars. They want to control outer space, as well as cyberspace, too.

[CCTAU 3,469]

Yeah, whatever. Read PNAC, look at its' members (At least five or six of them are in his administration) and reflect on his presidency so far. I was chalking it all up to mere coincidence until he started talking about going to the moon and to Mars. They want to control outer space, as well as cyberspace, too.

It's killing you guys that we have a president who is trying to think farther ahead than when the next cigar break is.

As far as space is concerned, where do you think that all the technology you use today came from? The race to go to the moon. Which btw, took place during the fighting of a war. You and yours would have us sit back a enjoy a cigar until other countries have passed us up technologically. Then you would blame it on the republicans. You are so full of hate that it make you freaking S T O O P I D !

[Tigermike 3,657]

Yeah, whatever. Read PNAC, look at its' members (At least five or six of them are in his administration) and reflect on his presidency so far. I was chalking it all up to mere coincidence until he started talking about going to the moon and to Mars. They want to control outer space, as well as cyberspace, too.

It's killing you guys that we have a president who is trying to think farther ahead than when the next cigar break is.

As far as space is concerned, where do you think that all the technology you use today came from? The race to go to the moon. Which btw, took place during the fighting of a war. You and yours would have us sit back a enjoy a cigar until other countries have passed us up technologically. Then you would blame it on the republicans. You are so full of hate that it make you freaking S T O O P I D !

Kind of like Kerry wanting to cut the Intelligence budget for years and then screaming to high heaven when the CIA & FBI were lacking before 9/11.

[CarolinaTiger 0]

shouldn't that title be 'grand strategerist'???

[Tiger Al 0]

shouldn't that title be 'grand strategerist'???

Only if Dubya says it and then only if he's also going to say nuke-ular in the same sentence.

[Tigermike 3,657]

Only if Dubya says it and then only if he's also going to say nuke-ular in the same sentence.

Is that from the liberal elitist handbook?

[Tiger Al 0]

Only if Dubya says it and then only if he's also going to say nuke-ular in the same sentence.

Is that from the liberal elitist handbook?

Observation of the species.

[Jenny AU-92 0]

Only if Dubya says it and then only if he's also going to say nuke-ular in the same sentence.

I have trouble pronouncing the word "squirrel" - no explanation for why. Guess that makes me a moron in your book too, huh, Al? The man grew up in TEXAS, for pete's sake. Hang out in Houston some time and I guarantee you will hear a lot of words spoken that don't meet your high grammatical standards. :roll:

In my opinion, it is WHAT you say, not necessarily HOW you say it. Bill Clinton was sure as hell articulate, but every fifth sentence out of his mouth was a lie. Give me substance over style ANY day. In fact, I tend to trust a man more when he is obviously speaking from the heart, stammers and all, and not from memorized sound bites and formulated lies and falsehoods.

[TitanTiger 21,068]

How is it that people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can mangle the English language and be considered reasonable candidates for President (at least by liberals), yet if Bush does it, he's some dope who can't tie his own shoes?

[Tiger Al 0]

Maybe we should all expect a man who graduated from Yale and Harvard and was a governer of a large state who is now president to be able to speak correctly. If it isn't too much to ask that a Mexican who comes here speak English, why should it be too much to ask that the leader of this country be able to do the same, especially one with his credentials?

In fact, I tend to trust a man more when he is obviously speaking from the heart, stammers and all, and not from memorized sound bites and formulated lies and falsehoods.

I guess being out there in Texas you heard ol' Dubya's lines so long and got so used to the packaging that you can't recognize it anymore.

Nuke-ular.

[TitanTiger 21,068]

It wouldn't stop 99% of liberals from voting for a dimbulb like Sharpton over Bush, so the argument rings rather hollow to me. It's an issue to them because they don't like him, not because speaking the queen's English is important.

And by the way, at least W can speak more than one language. I wouldn't say he's perfectly fluent in Spanish, but he can carry on a conversation from what I understand.

My point: this is a stupid thing to be concerned with.

[channonc 466]

It wouldn't stop 99% of liberals from voting for a dimbulb like Sharpton over Bush, so the argument rings rather hollow to me.

Titan, this is a rather bold statement. I don't know anybody who would vote Sharpton for janitor, much less President. And according to you all, I work with a bunch of "flaming librals," b/c I work in a Democratic office. I think that is unfair to stereotype. You don't like it when "the liberals" do that to the Republicans!

[TitanTiger 21,068]

Well, it was an overstatement , but there is a large percentage of the Democratic left that take the "anybody but Bush" thing quite literally and would vote accordingly.

[Tiger Al 0]

My point: this is a stupid thing to be concerned with.

You're right. It just amazes me how you folks will go to any length to protect any and every aspect of his image, as if it becomes some reflection on you personally for him to be criticized. It's like talking to a bammer about Bear. They would rather DIE than allow any little meaningless wart go unchallenged because, in their mind, Bear must be perfect. Any and all imperfections, real or perceived, must be crushed.

Same thing happens here. Instead of saying nothing and moving on to the next post or, agreeing with the obvious fact that George mispronounces NU-CLEE-UR, you guys want to fight to the death in his defense, as if he's kin or something! I think it's funny!

[TitanTiger 21,068]

Well, I meant stupid in the sense that "it's stupid for liberals to try to use this to make their implied point that he isn't smart enough to be President", but whatever.

[CarolinaTiger 0]

Well, it was an overstatement , but there is a large percentage of the Democratic left that take the "anybody but Bush" thing quite literally and would vote accordingly.

i think TA is in that bunch...is this so, al?

[Tiger Al 0]

Well, it was an overstatement  , but there is a large percentage of the Democratic left that take the "anybody but Bush" thing quite literally and would vote accordingly.

i think TA is in that bunch...is this so, al?

As much as it pains me to say it, if there were not a viable third party candidate available, yes, I would then vote for Al Sharpton or Dennis Kucinich or Pat Buchanon or Dora the Dinosaur or...

[TitanTiger 21,068]

That is sad. Let me ask...would you vote for Sharpton because you truly would rather have him as President over GWB, or would you vote for him knowing that the independents and moderates would heavily vote for Bush and that Sharpton wouldn't have a realistic chance in hell of actually winning? That way, you can maintain your moral outrage while knowing your in no actual danger of having that dolt as leader of the free world?

[CarolinaTiger 0]

As much as it pains me to say it, if there were not a viable third party candidate available, yes, I would then vote for Al Sharpton or Dennis Kucinich or Pat Buchanon or Dora the Dinosaur or...

but didn't you just say you wouldn't vote for a green dean candidate???

my 2-year old would vote for Dora before he'd vote for his mom!

further, he takes issue w/ your putting Dora in the same company as that bunch

ct

[TitanTiger 21,068]

Isn't it "Dora the Explorer" or am I out of sync with kiddie land?

[Tiger Al 0]

Isn't it "Dora the Explorer" or am I out of sync with kiddie land?

Dora the Dinosaur is a character on "The Wiggles." There's a "Dora the Explorer", too, but that's a cartoon. You'll get there soon enough!

[CCTAU 3,469]

My point: this is a stupid thing to be concerned with.

You're right. It just amazes me how you folks will go to any length to protect any and every aspect of his image, as if it becomes some reflection on you personally for him to be criticized. It's like talking to a bammer about Bear. They would rather DIE than allow any little meaningless wart go unchallenged because, in their mind, Bear must be perfect. Any and all imperfections, real or perceived, must be crushed.

Same thing happens here. Instead of saying nothing and moving on to the next post or, agreeing with the obvious fact that George mispronounces NU-CLEE-UR, you guys want to fight to the death in his defense, as if he's kin or something! I think it's funny!

We only defend a man that is being true to himself. He is a Texan first and and american second. Maybe you haven't had strong enough roots to understand. We like him because WYSIWYG. He's not hot rod with a flashy paint job and a doodle-bug engine. Like I said before, your hatred blinds you.