Bush and the World

Michael Hirsh

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002

Article preview: first 500 of 9,716 words total.

Summary:  George W. Bush experienced the terrible new reality of terrorism on September 11 as directly and emotionally as did any other American. The difference was that he could do something about it. Days after the attacks, the president first gave voice to his doctrine: you are either with us, or with the terrorists. But one year later, there is little clarity about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. To fight terrorism and protect U.S. interests and ideals, the only practical solution is to bolster the international community that the United States helped create.

Michael Hirsh, a former Foreign Editor of Newsweek, is writing a book about American foreign policy to be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2003.

THE NEED FOR A NEW WILSONIANISM

In its emotional impact, September 11, 2001, may have been the most horrifying single day in American history. As bloody as some of the great battles and disasters of the past have been, the news about them tended to trickle out: most Americans read detailed accounts of Antietam or Pearl Harbor well after the event. On September 11, Americans watched on television, in real time, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center burned and their fellow citizens flung themselves to their deaths from 100 stories up. Americans all watched as the towers imploded, and they all knew that they were witnessing, in seconds, the deaths of thousands of their compatriots in the nation's front yard.

George W. Bush experienced this terrible new reality as directly and as emotionally as any American. The difference was that he could do something about it. The United States was faced with an irreconcilable enemy; the sort of black-and-white challenge that had supposedly been transcended in the post-Cold War period, when the great clash of ideologies had ended, had now reappeared with shocking suddenness. And in Bush, the man seemed to meet the moment. For someone of the president's Manichaean sense of right and wrong and powerful religious faith -- not to mention unilateralist instincts -- the Bush doctrine came naturally (indeed, a senior adviser says Bush wrote the language himself). It also seemed to express the rage and grim resolve that many Americans were feeling. Bush's message to the world, first delivered on September 20, 2001, was this: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Either you stand with civilization and good (us), or with barbarism and evil (them). Choose. And to those nations that choose wrongly, beware.

In the year since Bush first gave voice to his doctrine, it has become the animating concept of American foreign policy, transforming the entire focus of his administration. The Bush doctrine has been used to justify a new assertiveness abroad unprecedented since the early days of the Cold War -- amounting nearly to the declaration of American hegemony -- and it has redefined U.S. relationships around the world. Under the hammer of the Bush doctrine, Pakistan was forced to relinquish its long-time support of the Taliban and its tolerance of al Qaeda, and Saudi Arabia had to confront the fact that 15 of its own disaffected citizens shaped under its fundamentalist Wahhabi brand of Islam had carried out the attacks.

The Bush doctrine has also helped to reinvigorate relations with major powers such as China, Russia, and India, each of which faces its own terrorist insurgency, and all of which are now, in a happily Bismarckian way, on friendlier terms with Washington than with each other. The president has used the Bush doctrine to isolate Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil" -- even though almost no one else around the world views them quite that way -- and to ...

End of preview: first 500 of 9,716 words total.