Neocons Getting Bluffed

In further proof that the media has an uncanny ability to spin ANYTHING bad by this Administration into a positive, David Sanger writes in today's New York Times about the kinder, gentler foreign policy of the Bush Administration:

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."

Those quotes do make it painfully clear that the President is not urging patience because he wants to. He'd be perfectly content to slash and burn his way through Pyongyang and Tehran if the National Institute of Health would only finish their plan to clone soldiers. Other articles this week try to portray this foreign policy shift as a deliberate "strategic makeover" by the White House. But Sanger is a little more... sanguine than that, and he doesn't describe a wise and patient President, willing to let diplomacy run its course, but a frazzled leader whose missteps and incompetence have cornered him into such a stance, limiting his options and leaving him no choice but to negotiate. In fact, it all goes back to that 800-pound Mesopotamian gorilla:

To Mr. Bush's critics, the question goes to the heart of the new argument over pre-emption: whether Mr. Bush, in focusing on Iraq in 2003, missed his chance. It was in January of that year, as American forces were flowing toward the Middle East, that North Korea threw out the international inspectors who had been watching over its stockpile of nuclear fuel, and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The action did not have the drama of a multiple-missile launchings. But unlike the test-firings, it was a clearer violation of international law. (Any country has a right to exit the treaty with 90 days' notice, but the North evicted the inspectors before that period expired.)

But Mr. Bush made no effort then to seek sanctions at the United Nations Security Council, or to rally China and Russia to impose economic sanctions. One senior former official who was involved in the discussions said Mr. Bush was briefed on his military options to strike at the nuclear facilities before the spent fuel rods were moved — but the options looked bad, and he turned back to the Iraq invasion plan.

Administration officials still defend that decision, saying that Saddam Hussein lived in a more volatile neighborhood and needed to be dealt with first. But as one senior American diplomat who was involved in the Iraq decision conceded late last week, "The decisions we made then narrowed our options now."

It's not that Bush is switching tactics because he is learning from his mistakes, but that he is discovering his initial forays into the doctrine of pre-emption were a FAILURE - and their effects are still being felt today. He's pissed off and boxed in, as Josh Marshall says. And with good reason: the neocons he trusted got jobbed. If it was poker, they'd be out of the tournament before the first blinds got raised.

It seemed like it wasn't so long ago that there was something of a coherent foreign policy in the White House, whether you liked it or not. They even had a name for it. The Bush Doctrine. "We will make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them." "We will act pre-emptively to secure our nation." "Oceans can't protect us from harm, so we will not be isolationist." "Freedom is God's gift to every human being on the planet, and we will bring the fires of freedom to every darkened corner of the globe."

These were very real policy statements. They didn't always abide by them (like letting tyrannical governments in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and... OK, they pretty much didn't abide by them), but they were there. And they sprung from a decades-in-the-making strategy of muscular intervention which said that projecting American power across the globe was the only way to maintain hegemony. They applied them in Afghanistan. Then we set off on a misadventure that was conceived years earlier, to saber-rattle our way into Iraq and force a confrontation. This sent a consistent message to the world: get on America's shit list and you'll get squashed.

And indeed, this bolstered the other countries listed on the Axis of Evil's commemorative stemware set to get with the (nuclear) program as a means of self-protection. If you had WMD, the theory went, the United States would negotiate; if you were SUSPECTED of having weapons, bombs away!

Billmon has an unrelated-yet-somehow-related post up about how acting all angry-like and unilateral and getting in the world's face and stuff during the run-up to Iraq has set an expectation for how this Administration deals with threats, and emboldened other world leaders, particularly in the wake of the Iraquagmire, to call our bluff.

This is something the Vulcans probably should have thought about before they took their shiny new doctrine out for a test drive to Baghdad. When you launch an aggressive war after going through the motions of diplomacy, your opponents are entitled to assume you're likely to do it again in a similar situation.

Indeed, such expectations themselves can make war more likely. Believing your diplomatic gestures completely insincere, your opponent may choose defiance, forcing you to either follow through on your "doctrine" or suffer an enormous loss of credibilty -- the coin of the realm in international relations. This, in turn, can lead other players (like those pesky global energy markets) to ratchet up their perceptions of the risk of war, which in turn provides ammunition to those on your side who argue (or like Frum simply imply) that war has become the lesser of two practical evils -- i.e. if you want to bring those oil prices down, you gotta send in the Air Force.

So, for example, North Korea perceives our weakened state, and acts aggressively, shooting off a bunch of missiles and forcing us to either retaliate or look foolish. We can't even get a UN resolution through without deays. Iran perceives our weakened state and shoots its mouth off, daring us to strike or look like a paper tiger. On the sidelines are the neocon media team, agitating for attack.

North Korea is firing missiles. Iran is going nuclear. Somalia is controlled by radical Islamists. Iraq isn't getting better, and Afghanistan is getting worse," says William Kristol, a leading conservative commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. (You forgot Darfur, Bill, where fighting is now WORSE since the rebels and the government made a peace deal- ed.)

"I give the President a lot of credit for hanging tough on Iraq. But I am worried it has made them (the White House) too passive in confronting the other threats."

But the reality on the ground is that the White House doesn't have the resources, doesn't have the international cooperation, doesn't have the intelligence, doesn't have the leverage, and doesn't even have the moral high ground to do much of anything. And the entire reason for this passivity concerns those 138,000 US troops in the midst of civil war in a haphazardly designed country that has never known peace. The Iraq policy wasn't just a horrendous decision because of what is going on in Iraq; it has all kinds of extrapolations and permutations that have made us less safe.

Kristol is right that Iraq has made the White House passive. But not for the reasons he thinks.

To close, I give you Kevin Drum, who gives the definitive statement on the inflatable raft that is coming apart in the foreign policy pond at the White House:

The Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There's virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.

As near as I can tell, George Bush has learned that "There's evil in the world and we're going to stand up to it" isn't really adequate as a foreign policy for a superpower but is unable to figure out anything better to replace it with. So he spins his wheels, waiting for 2009. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left spinning with him.