The New York Times reports that President George Bush is making a stylistic shift — partly due to a rethinking of approach and partly due to the new power-realities that face him:
President Bush has never made apologies for enshrining pre-emption as the defining doctrine of his first term. He has declared many times that in a post-9/11 world, presidents no longer have the luxury of waiting for the slow grinding of diplomatic give-and-take when unpredictable dictators are assembling arsenals that could threaten the United States.
But as he leaves for Europe and Russia this week, where the simultaneous nuclear standoffs in Iran and North Korea will top the agenda, Mr. Bush finds himself struggling to square his muscular declarations with the realpolitik of his second term after the invasion of Iraq. At every turn, and every provocation, he finds himself in an unaccustomed position: urging patience.
“These problems didn’t rise overnight, and they don’t get solved overnight,” he told reporters during an hourlong news conference in Chicago on Friday. At another point, he said: “You know, the problem with diplomacy, it takes a while to get something done. If you’re acting alone, you can move quickly.” Underscoring the idea again, he said, “It’s painful in a way for some to watch because it takes a while to get people on the same page.”
It seems to be a shift in approach, in stark contrast to how GWB handled other foreign matters, the Times reports:
The Chicago news conference was notable because it seemed to mark the completion of a rhetorical journey for Mr. Bush. It is a journey that has steadily moved away, in public pronouncements — if not the president’s own thinking — from the lines he drew in the 2002 State of the Union address. In that famous “axis of evil” speech, he identified the threats from Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the three most pressing post-9/11 challenges facing the United States.
“We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side,” he said in one of the most-quoted passages of what became the signature speech of his administration. “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”
Some conservatives are now upset with Bush’s new approach:
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in The Wall Street Journal after North Korea’s missile tests last week that North Korea had achieved more “strategic successes” under the Bush administration than it had under President Clinton.
“Apparently unwilling to move against North Korea’s nuclear challenges by itself, and evidently incapable of fashioning a practical response involving allies and others, the Bush administration’s response to Pyongyang’s atomic provocations is today principally characterized by renewed calls for additional rounds of toothless conference diplomacy,” he wrote.
This weekend in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, another prominent conservative voice, wrote: “The red lines, pink lines, and mauve lines of U.S. foreign policy seem increasingly to be written in erasable ink. What was ‘unacceptable’ to President Bush a week ago (a North Korean missile launch) has been accepted.” He called the current policy “Clintonian.”
Mr. Bush’s aides, who decline to speak about their internal deliberations on North Korea and Iran for attribution, say their critics have done everything but describe a workable alternative. Iran, they note, is five or more years from a nuclear weapon — and, in their more candid moments, they acknowledge that it has numerous options for retaliating for any military action.
This not the first time this has happened to a President who had his own approach to foreign or other affairs — it’s just that it has taken a bit longer with this one. Sooner or later there seems to be a kind of convergence of various geopolitical, international and domestic factors that cause Presidents to adjust their course or approach.
The question: is this limited to the touchy North Korea situation or part of a more general shift that’ll become more apparent as Bush’s second term winds down? And is this due to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s rising stock and clout within the Bush administration?
One thing clear from the Times piece: the neocons are not happy about how the North Korea crisis is being handled.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.