Bush's foreign policy legacy not without merits

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By Fu Mengzi (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-07 07:45

George W. Bush now has less than 100 days left before he packs up and leaves the White House, while the country takes stock of his presidency, particularly in terms of foreign relations, to see what kind of a legacy he is leaving behind.

President Bush launched the war in Afghanistan less than two weeks after the September 11 incident and then extended US firepower to Iraq in 2003. If the Afghan War managed to win understanding from the rest of the world, invading Iraq without legal or moral support only proved an extreme example of the US' unilateralism and aptness to launch preemptive strikes against another independent state.

The war in Iraq threatened to split the alliance between the US and its European allies and eroded the US' moral integrity as it dragged on. It also cost the country several hundred million dollars a day in addition to more than 4,000 US troops killed there. Today over 100,000 American military members remain in Iraq and there is no sign the war will end any time soon.

The Bush administration made some changes during its second term in office. As a policy it admitted the war on Iraq was a wrong move based on faulty intelligence. And, in terms of government lineup, several prominent "hawks", including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and a former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, were sacrificed as scapegoats and taken off the official list of foreign and security policymakers.

It also sought to increase cooperation with other major powers. However, as the problems caused by the war on Iraq continued to worsen, it became apparent to many that the war was dragging the US down and making it difficult for Washington to handle other major issues as effectively as it wanted to, apart from damaging its international status. The Republican Party lost its Senate majority in the mid-term elections two years ago. This was seen as the American public's way of declaring it had had enough of a seemingly never-ending war.

Most of the Bush administration's major problems were created in the first term of its eight-year rule. But Bush should not be blamed for all of them, as changes in the country's internal political climate and external environment also played their part.

Bush winning the presidential election was a triumph of neo-conservatism. Therefore it was probably crazy to expect him to repeat what the Bill Clinton's administration did. The tremendous psychological damage caused by the September 11 attacks kept the War on Terror on top of the political agenda as a national consensus, giving Bush no choice but to charge ahead, mindful that any retreat would allow terrorism to fight back, an unthinkable political price to pay.

All in all, Bush's two-term presidency has not been entirely without merit in terms of foreign affairs.

First, the war on Iraq will be a Bush legacy in the history of US foreign strategy. The nation fought on two fronts after 9/11 - fighting two wars overseas - in its global war on terror while beefing up homeland security. The American public, though obviously annoyed, managed to put up with the wartime inconvenience of heightened security measures.

The Bush administration should feel quite good about the fact that no terrorist attacks have happened on American soil since the 9/11 incident despite repeated alarms over such threats.

Fighting on two fronts has cost the US a great deal but its homeland is safer than before. The Iraq War got rid of Saddam Hussein and established a democratic government in that country under US control. Though terrorist and extremist suicide attacks continue to shake the Gulf nation, the Iraqi government has not become a sympathetic umbrella for terrorism.

That said, the war on Iraq is no match to the improved US-China relationship, which is the Bush administration's greatest foreign affairs legacy.

China is a big country on the rise. US politicians and strategists, convinced that rising major powers tend to try to challenge the existing hegemony, have always been concerned about China's growing strength. That is why the Bush administration treated China as a strategic competitor early on.

After the Sept 11 attacks, or maybe when then Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Beijing in July that year, the Bush administration made significant adjustments to its China policy and made cooperation between the two countries a top priority.

Compared with the US-EU and the US-Russia relations, it is quite remarkable that the Bush government has managed to forge a relationship of cooperation between the biggest rising power and the existing superpower in the world that has so far achieved the longest period of stable bilateral ties after the tumultuous post-Cold War era.

Even amid rising noises of Western threats to boycott the Beijing Olympic Games earlier this year, President Bush more or less maintained his support for China's right to realize its century-old dream by reaffirming his attendance at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympiad. He is the first US president to attend the Opening Ceremony of an Olympic Games held in a foreign country, a feat hard to ignore in the history of the United States and of the US-China relations.

Politically and historically speaking, the development of the Sino-US relationship will have a great and positive impact on the future of the world. The fact that the US government under President Bush achieved the longest period of stable development of the US-China ties should qualify as the greatest foreign policy legacy of his administration.

Unlike the US-Soviet relations of the Cold-War era, the current Sino-US ties serve the political, security, economic and cultural exchanges between the two countries in the era of globalization, as their national interests are more intertwined and overlapping than ever before.

The two nations still find themselves lacking mutual strategic confidence and challenged by contradictions and frictions every now and then. But the situation in which their interests are tightly latched together requires both governments to think carefully and act cautiously when it comes to maintaining bilateral ties. This will benefit not only the two countries but also the world as a whole.

Last but not the least, the disablement of the nuclear facilities of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), as a regional issue, may also be an "irreversible" foreign policy legacy to the Bush administration's credit.

The DPRK halted the nuclear disablement process by reactivating its Yongbyon nuclear facility because of differences over the way to verify compliance with the US after it submitted its detailed report on its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June.

However, the two countries finally reached an agreement during a Pyongyang visit in early October by Christopher Hill, chief US delegate to the Six Party Talks on the Korea Nuclear Issue. After that the US removed the DPRK from its list of governments "supporting terrorism".

The turn of events not only rescued the Korean Peninsula denuclearization process from derailment but also prevented the achievement of the Six Party Talks from going down the drain after five years of painstaking efforts.

The ultimate resolution of the Korean nuclear issue may still prove an arduous and delicate undertaking from now on, but it will be kept going till Bush's term in office is up and considered one of his achievements in foreign affairs.

It should be mentioned that the US government under President Bush has made some progress in developing its relations with Latin American countries. While Bush became the US president who visited more Latin American nations than any of his predecessors, the US hosted and took part in three summit meetings of American countries. Though little progress has been made in establishing a pan-Americas free trade zone, the US has signed bilateral free trade pacts with 10 Latin American nations so far.

The author is assistant president of the China Institute of Contemporary International

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(China Daily 11/07/2008 page9)