Nick Guyatt, Campus Greens
 

Like father, like son

Now that the endless wrangling in Florida has ended, we can start worrying about four years of Bush foreign policy. As with the other dimensions of a Bush presidency, there's plenty of hysterical speculation right now about just how bad things are going to be – naturally, some of the most doom-laden visions come from Democrats, who've presumably been sleeping the last eight years through the prolonged genocide in Bosnia, the outrageous US efforts to deter international intervention in Rwanda, and the continuing depredations of the Iraqi people suffering under US-imposed sanctions. But, no matter – even if Clinton's been a disaster, Bush isn't going to be a lot better. It's worth digging in now and preparing ourselves for the kind of foreign policy he's going to employ.

Maybe the best place to turn for a guide to Bush's likely actions is the presidency of George Herbert Bush, who occupied the White House from 1989 to 1993. There are many reasons to suspect that Bush Jr. will pursue a similar course to his father. First, W. has surrounded himself with veterans of the last Republican administration. The most visible of these are Dick Cheney, who maintained the bloated US military as Secretary of Defense even after the fall of the Berlin Wall; and Colin Powell, Bush Sr.'s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who made his name in the one-sided pummeling of Saddam Hussein (and his tyrannised civilian population). In fact, both Cheney and Powell have made much of their service against Iraq, as if the bizarre and inchoate conclusion to that war was entirely the responsibility of the Clinton administration.
 

The Class of '91

The second reason to suspect a continuity across the Bush family is W's own obvious weaknesses as a leader. Before and during the presidential campaign, it was painfully obvious that George Jr. was not a man for details. Even his staged efforts to right this image failed miserably – a particular highlight was his mix-up of the Indian president and prime minister in a TV quiz which he himself suggested, to answer those critics who'd chuckled at his earlier malapropisms and mental slips. Bush has stated repeatedly that he'll be eager to delegate many tasks to his appointees – and so we're probably in for the most hands-off presidency since the years of Ronald Reagan, another 'communicator' who was ready to delegate even as his subordinates plunged into intrigue and illegality.

As vice-president, Cheney can act as nomenclator to a  muddled W., especially when foreign leaders come calling; the veep will be well-placed more generally to strike the tone of Bush's foreign policy, and to press for increased funds for the military. Colin Powell, meanwhile, is the obvious point-man for Bush's minimalist policies on foreign intervention. A word on this: if you're at all disturbed by the Clinton administration's various interventions (Haiti, Somalia, Iraq, Kosovo, and so on), the notion of a more minimalist foreign policy sounds like an improvement. It's true that Bush won't be rushing troops into central Africa or East Timor – but then, neither did Clinton. (Gore, meanwhile, even claimed during the presidential debates that the US failure to intervene in Rwanda was “the right decision.”) Bush Sr.'s 1992 humanitarian intervention in Somalia in the last days of his presidency mutated under Clinton into an armed conflict, and concluded with the deaths of more than 20 American soldiers and at least 1000 Somali civilians – again, it's hard to see the Bush Jr. team getting into that kind of mess. The new Secretary of State has lent his name to an intellectual justification for US apathy – the 'Powell Doctrine' holds that US troops should only be committed in situations where planners can easily envisage a swift outcome, and where sufficient troops are available to expedite this outcome. (Early versions of the Powell Doctrine suggested that the best way to intervene was with massive force, as the turkey-shoot in Iraq had demonstrated.) We're certain to see evidence of this thinking in the next four years, and there are bound to be parts of the world ignored by Bush which desperately need international peacekeeping troops. On balance, however, this aggressive apathy may be more palatable than the “assertive multilateralism” of the Clinton administration, which achieved its zenith in 1993 as 'peacekeeping' US commandos shot their way out of Mogadishu.
 

How much worse can it get?

It's hard to predict the specific course of Bush's foreign actions, but some current crises will continue to involve the US government. Bill Clinton's 'Plan Colombia', the more than $1.5bn in military assistance for the 'drug war' in the Colombian countryside, may be rather less secure under Republicans than Democrats. Congressional leaders approved the plan, but there's already a sense among some that the US escalation may be ineffective. Moreover, Colin Powell's ideas on limited intervention, coupled with his first-hand experience of the Vietnam War (albeit in some particularly unsavory moments of that disaster – My Lai among them...), make him an unlikely candidate to lead American troops into another jungle war. If an about-turn in Colombia is to be welcomed, the Republican team will probably make up for its good deeds by withdrawing US troops rapidly from Bosnia and Kosovo. Since the extreme fractiousness of the latter is partly due to the outrageous US tactics in the 1999 bombing of the province (put simply: attack the Serbs from the air but decline to engage them on the ground, even as they begin massive ethnic cleansing), the United States would be particularly derelict in withdrawing its peacekeepers. However, Bush and Powell may use diplomatic pressure to persuade the Europeans – especially the British – to take up the slack in the former Yugoslavia, thereby satisfying their Congressional leadership which has crowed for an end to these internationalist-sounding peacekeeping missions.

It seems hard to imagine that a new American administration will have a positive influence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly as the new Palestinian intifada has confirmed the death of the Oslo peace process in which the United States staked so much of its credibility. However, George Bush may be able to get some distance from Oslo, since the current peace process was effectively shepherded from its earliest moments by Bill Clinton. Yasser Arafat raced to congratulate Bush when he finally emerged from the counting and the lawsuits, and hinted that the accession of Senior's son would mark a new opening for a more impartial US role in the Middle East. There is at least some reason for Arafat's optimism. Bush Sr. is fondly remembered by Palestinians for standing up to Israeli PMs Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin in 1991 and 1992, Bush the elder having the temerity to ask Israel (relatively seriously) to freeze its massive expansion of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. But Arafat would do well to remember that Bush eventually caved to Rabin, and that settlement expansion continued in the last months of 1992 at a record rate. Within the US, Bush Sr. and his Secretary of State, James Baker, were accused of anti-Semitism. Since Bush's chief crime here appeared to have been his brief reluctance completely to capitulate to Israel, we shouldn't be surprised if his son – and Secretary Powell – skillfully avoid the same mistake. The best hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace may reside in the kind of low-profile US foreign policy that Bush and Powell have promised – this could open the door to a more assertive European role, and will at least remove the stranglehold over the 'peace process' which the American government has exercised in the past eight years.

Major questions remain – how will Bush handle China, especially if Taiwan continues to pursue a more independent course? Will Bush be able to make a fresh start with Russia, or will he inherit the Clinton administration's breathless desire to praise Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats as a democratic bulwark? Republicans in Congress have rattled the bars on both issues, referring to Russia and China as if the Cold War was still driving foreign policy. In office, the Republicans will probably adopt the same double standard which has sustained the Democrats since 1993: claim that the world is still an extremely dangerous place, which justifies massive military spending at near-Cold War levels; then treat Russia and China, America's only possible rivals in any kind of military skirmish, as valued trading partners, binding them so tightly to a US-led economic system that they'd be insane to challenge the US in any forum, political, economic or military. The recent passage of the China Trade Act in Congress, with a massive bipartisan majority, is ample evidence that the Clinton policy on China – condemn the Chinese for human rights abuses even as you ship American manufacturing plants across the Pacific – will find no serious opponents in a Bush White House.
 

Nightmares and a wake-up call

Traditionally, the biggest nightmare in foreign policy terms that we can expect from Republicans is massive military spending. Ronald Reagan demonstrated in the 1980s that a Republican president could find money for the most baroque military systems even in times of economic duress – and the sheer chutzpah of some of his spending programs, such as 'Star Wars' anti-missile research, produced groans from moderate Republicans and Democrats alike. A lot has changed since then. In particular, Bill Clinton led the Democratic party into a new era of unchallenged military profligacy. While Reagan could point (albeit with diminishing credibility) to the Soviet nuclear arsenal as he ratcheted up US arms spending in the eighties, Clinton preserved the military budget at near-Cold War levels in the 1990s even as the Russian military fell apart. Eventually, Clinton even came to endorse the sine qua non of Reaganite white elephants, the Star Wars missile defense program – investing tens of billions of dollars in a series of tests which enriched defense contractors but which failed to show much success. Clinton's defense secretary, the Republican William Cohen, also endorsed a platform of 'modernization' which would include massive new military projects like the F-22 fighter – committing the US to a cycle of technological upgrades which would replace currently-unchallenged military hardware. The desire of the Democrats to seem 'tough' on defense was hardly dented by Bill Clinton's deferral of a decision on missile defense until the next administration – hence Al Gore's $100bn allocation of additional military funds, his advisers presumably reckoning that their candidate had to outspend George Bush's $50bn increase by a factor of two to compensate for the public impression that Democrats were weak-kneed on defense.

In the best case scenario, a Bush presidency will spare us the more egregious moments of Madeleine Albright's “assertive multilateralism” and may create some space for other international actors – especially the European nations – to form genuinely multilateral alliances. Moreover, the fact that Bush felt no need to match Al Gore's enormous military spending proposal during the presidential campaign suggests that the Bush administration may not resort to porkbarrel grandstanding to establish its military credibility. Ironically, then, the best hope for some restraint in military spending may lie in a Republican presidency. Although the Democrats proved singularly unable to consign the National Missile Defense to oblivion, there's a possibility that Bush might be relaxed enough to listen to reason (and the deplorable test results) and cave on this, in a Nixon-goes-to-China sort of way. We should remember, though, that the Republicans (like the Democrats) are deeply entangled with the defense corporations that seek these military procurement projects, and so we're more likely to see Star Wars dollars redirected to another flashy weapon than put into education or social spending where they might actually do some good.

In the worst case scenario, Bush will continue Clinton's policies in Colombia and Israel-Palestine, and perpetuate the sanctions regime against Iraq. Although some liberals have expressed the dire fear that Bush will blunder into a more profound war (from the US perspective – obviously, US military funding or intervention in central America and the Middle East is a big deal for the peoples who live in those regions), his national security team will presumably err on the side of caution and keep him out of trouble. The challenges for progressives, meanwhile, will be twofold: to keep the pressure on Bush to support the United Nations in peacekeeping efforts around the globe; and to discourage Bush from simply perpetuating the ongoing injustices (in Iraq, and Colombia, and elsewhere) bequeathed him by the Clinton foreign policy team. In the long term, we've got to make sure that the next time a Republican president is succeeded by a supposedly more progressive commander-in-chief, we get a more progressive foreign policy as well. In military spending and foreign relations, we have to counter American 'bipartisanship' with a genuine and forward-looking alternative.