The Reluctant Realism of George H. W. Bush
Prepared Remarks
Timothy Naftali
AEI Bradley Lecture
January 14, 2008
Good afternoon. I wish to thank Chris DeMuth and the American Enterprise Institute for inviting me to present this Bradley Lecture. In the twilight of the George W. Bush administration, while the leading Democratic and Republican presidential contenders are fighting over who is more committed to change, and while a war unpopular with over two-thirds of Americans continues to take its toll in Iraq, it may seem eccentric or ill-advised that someone in Washington might have something complimentary to say about anyone named Bush. Ten years ago Governor George W. Bush, the keynote speaker at the opening of his father's presidential library in College Station, Texas, said that history would look kindly on his already politically passé dad. What the younger Bush could not have known then was that it would be due to his own shortcomings as president that historians would take a fond, second look at George H. W. Bush. Comparisons between the two presidents Bush were of course made immediately after the long election of 2000 and appeared especially newsworthy when a friend of the 41st president, General Brent Scowcroft, publicly differed with the current administration over Iraq in 2002. But in light of the foreign policy challenges facing the next occupant of the White House whoever she happens to be, the question of the differences between the two men is still not yet simply a matter of historical curiosity. A quarter of a century ago, the historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote Strategies of Containment, arguing that there had been basically two approaches to fighting the Cold War, one that seemed to ascribe unlimited resources to the problem, another that was more cautious, circumspect. Although it over-generalized at the margins, the book was a avery smart way to compare and contrast how presidential administrations manage this country's largest foreign policy challenges. Two decades later we use codewords like neo-con, realist or idealist; reality-based or faith-based to get at the fact that presidencies manage foreign challenges differently. Sometimes they do this because of an intense desire to differentiate themselves from the president before them; sometimes because of the domestic politics of the era; sometimes because of the character of the individual president and his ideas.
In a new book, George H. W. Bush, I provide a portrait of George Bush, the father, as a president who exhibited greatness when his country most needed it. Today I would like to tell the highlights of that story and tease out some policy-relevant implications for those interested in the future of foreign policy realism. The data should all be well known to this audience, but it is my hope that when examined carefully some interesting patterns emerge that underscore just how well the elder Bush met the foreign policy challenges of his time. Historians love thick description and I am no exception, but what will also emerge is a theme of realism in power. This is not a story of unalloyed success. History, faithfully told, rarely is. This is also not the story of realism with relish. Americans, as I will argue, are traditionally reluctant realists and Bush 41 was well within that tradition.
In the first part tonight, I will discuss the key decisions that President Bush made regarding the two principal foreign policies challenges that he faced--the end of the Cold War and fighting the Gulf War--and I will also examine their consequences. And in the time remaining I will attempt to put Bushian realism in context, both historical and current. This elder statesman is 83-years old and not currently running for office. But there are lessons for leaders, a generation, or more, younger.
In the first books after the collapse of the Soviet Union, authors debating whether Mikhail Gorbachev or Ronald Reagan deserved the greater credit for ending the Cold War. My money is on Gorbachev in that debate. Without his having rewired the circuitry in the Kremlin and the mini-Kremlins throughout Eastern Europe, it would not have happened. But that old debate missed a key question. As important as the fact the Cold War ended was the way in which it ended: relatively peacefully, with few lives lost and comparatively little global upheaval. Consider for the moment the collapse of Belgian empire--the horrors of Congo; the Portuguese empire--the horrors of Angola; let alone that of the French empire--Indochina, Algiers and later Chad. Even the comparatively poised retreat of the British brought millions of deaths in the Indian subcontinent, in Nigeria and some troubles in a place called Palestine. George Bush deserves as much credit as Mikhail Gorbachev for the peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire and the resulting soft landing of the Cold War.
Bush, however, stumbled out of the gate in 1989 and in this regard his realism was no help. His initial policy toward Gorbachev was affected by a long forgotten foreign policy debate between Nixon realists and George Shultz at the end of the Reagan era. Although Shultz had been a major player in the Nixon administration, he found himself the target of sniping from Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and, indirectly, Richard Nixon for allowing Ronald Reagan to get too close to Mikhail Gorbachev after 1986. Realists were asking the foreign policy equivalent of "where's the beef" a taunt used very successfully against Walter Mondale in the 1984 campaign. Skeptics of the Reagan-Shultz approach believed that Gorbachev was mainly a PR specialist whose words never matched his deeds. The Soviets were still in Eastern Europe; they were still in Afghanistan; they still supported the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro. Facing the Fulda Gap in Germany, were Soviet tanks with war plans that reflected an offensive doctrine. These were the facts on the ground. And even if Gorby believed in creating a different strategic reality for a US president, did it not still behoove an American commander in chief to tie diplomacy to what actually was and not what one hoped it would be? A weakness in this analysis was the fact of the INF treaty of 1987, which signaled the reversal of a long-standing Soviet policy against on-site inspection, evidence that something fundamental had changed in the Kremlin.
Although he had been Reagan's Vice President, Bush was heavily influenced by the realist critique of Reagan. He made Brent Scowcroft his National Security Adviser and after the collapse of the John Tower nomination brought Dick Cheney in to be Secretary of Defense. Cheney was also a Gorboskeptic.
While an emphasis on facts on the ground initially produced caution toward Gorby--and a raft of criticism from the Europeans and many here--it did not produce paralysis in US foreign policy. In the first months of 1989, the Bush administration set about correcting both ends of the Iran-Contra mess that it had inherited from the Reagan administration. The administration refocused its efforts in Nicaragua away from a strategy of relying on the contras for regime change to sponsoring free elections and the Oval Office stopping talking about the Americans held hostage in Beirut, in an effort to reduce public pressure to sacrifice larger strategic goals in behalf of freeing those hostages and to pursue quieter approaches.
The Bush administration turned as the facts started changing in Eastern Europe. Liberalization in Poland in February 1989 brought a new US doctrine to support those regimes that liberalized. In the past we had supported regimes that were anti-Soviet--Ceaucescu's Romania being the most notorious example. While appealing to Wilsonians, the policy was as much rooted in the desire to help little Gorbys in Eastern Europe who might assist and further Gorbachev's efforts at reform in the Soviet Union. Events in China also pushed Bush to come up with a more activist policy. The massacre in Tiananmen Square tested the over fifteen-year-old Sino-American rapprochement. A student of Nixon and Kissinger, Bush accepted the strategic value of that relationship even though the Chinese crackdown appalled him. Bush placed some sanctions on China, helped dissidents and froze part o the relationship but he refused to cut off contact due to the importance of the relationship. But one lesson was clear, he needed to help fledgling democrats in Eastern Europe so that they did not share the same fate as the young people in the streets of Beijing.
When the Berlin Wall fell in November, George Bush's realist tendencies would begin to have world historical consequences. On November 9, Bush decided not to "dance on the Wall" as some had suggested. Bush got flak from both sides of the spectrum, from Lesley Stahl to Peggy Noonan, for failing to put an eloquent full stop on the day's momentous events. Never an eloquent man, Bush however did not make this decision because of his limitations as a speaker. He grasped that the worst thing one could do with Soviet power and influence in swift decline was to rub the Kremlin's nose in it. John F. Kennedy, who also showed flashed of great realism, had grasped the same in late October 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis. His White House tapes from that area are full of his admonition to pocket the victory, lest the Soviet do something impulsive, and dangerous, out of pique.
Something fascinating about Bush is that despite strong instincts he had a chip on his shoulder about his reputation for weakness. He talked about it with friend and adversary alike. In a very revealing letter to Gorbachev before the Malta summit, he wrote, "there are people in the United States who accuse me of being too cautious. It is true I am a prudent man, but I am not a coward, and my administration will seek to avoid doing anything that would damage your position in the world. But I was insistently advised to do something of the sort--to climb the Berlin Wall and to make broad declarations. My administration, however, is avoiding these steps; we are in favor of reserved behavior." But people mistook this reserve for an indecisiveness. The record is quite clear, however, that George Bush is responsible for making a unified Germany within NATO the goal of US foreign policy in the wake of the collapse of the East German police state. He was the first in his administration to believe that objective possible. And it would be one of the greatest US foreign policy accomplishments of the second half of the twentieth century.
Bush's challenge to make that goal a reality in early 1990 was missed by many observers. At Malta in December 1989, Bush had told Gorbachev that despite its formal position, the United States would treat Lithuania as an internal matter of the USSR so long as Gorbachev promised not to use force in the republic and agreed that eventually the principle of self-determination should be extended there. This was a private understanding that reflected some inescapable realities. The United States had no way to protect Lithuania should the Soviets decide to deploy their forces to quell the separatist movement. But it also reflected a judgment call about the nature of reform in the Soviet Union. Ultimately the survival of Baltic independence would require a revolution in the way that the Kremlin understood its sphere of influence. The only revolutionary in Moscow with any sway was Gorbachev. This meant tough love for Lithuanian democrats in the short run and a hide of steel against critics who would be sure to see the contradiction in Bush's policy.
In the wake of the Lithuanian declaration of independence, it appeared that Gorbachev was unwilling or unable to hold up his end of his bargain with Bush. On March 26, Soviet troops took control of some government buildings in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and started looking for young Lithuanians who refused to appear for duty in the Soviet army. In response, Bush and Baker stood alone in the administration in wanting to continue to tilt toward Gorbachev. Scowcroft and Cheney preferred a tougher line, but Bush overruled them.
The Bush administration swallowed hard and decided that the future of European security depended on keeping Gorbachev in charge of Soviet policy long enough to effect the unification of Germany and a pullback of Soviet troops from Europe. To the disappointment of bipartisan majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, as well as to many in the media, the administration muted its criticism of Soviet policy in Lithuania while using backchannels to get the two sides to talk. The administration sent Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana as an unofficial envoy to Vilnius to recommend to the Lithuanians that their best strategy in the short term was to keep the Soviets talking.
When Gorbachev imposed a partial energy embargo on the breakaway republic in late April 1990, pressure built for U.S. sanctions against Moscow in the style of those initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, after the invasion of Afghanistan. In addition to the politically deft Baltic-American lobby, Bush faced widespread opposition from idealists and realists alike. The conservative columnist George Will wrote acidly that the Lithuanian crisis proved that "Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom." Meanwhile the grand old man of American realism, Richard Nixon, let the New York Times know that he feared Bush was making the same mistake as Reagan by identifying the continued political survival of Gorbachev with U.S. interests. The unkindest cut of all came from Lithuania's president Vytautas Landsbergis, who in the face of the Soviet energy embargo assailed Bush for authoring a latter-day Munich, the twentieth century's symbol of wrongheaded appeasement.
But Bush judged that Gorbachev was the Soviet leader most likely to accept a unified Germany in NATO and to support widespread cuts in Soviet armaments. Rather than take some cheap rhetorical shots, Bush absorbed the criticism and continued to maneuver Gorbachev. In May 1990, Gorbachev committed one of the great about faces in international diplomacy. When Bush asked him whether he agreed that the Germans had a right to decide for themselves whether or not to join NATO, Gorbachev said that he agreed. In June NATO admitted observers from the Warsaw Pact for the first time. And in July 1990, the Soviets fully embraced to what had seemed impossible only months earlier: Eastern Germany in NATO. The US and the Soviet Union had weathered three major crises over the fate of West Berlin, let alone East Germany. The Eastern regime had been a showcase for socialism; it was a major strategic point for the Soviet armed forces. And Gorbachev gave it all up. Later, as he had hinted to Bush, he effectively let the Baltics go.
Those of us who recall 1990-1991 sensed an inevitability about it all. But in retrospect there was nothing inevitable at all that Gorbachev's conservative opponents would lose and Bush and Helmut Kohl and the German people would win.
Bush's role in giving the Cold War a softlanding prefigured his handling of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq in August 1990, the other great foreign policy challenge of his administration. The entrails of that war have been studied with the intensity expected from druids. But again much about the context in which Bush made decisions and the actual decisions he made has been lost. "This will not stand" was a declaration in favor of a post-Cold War world. Arguably the post-Cold War world Bush was thinking of, where international organizations and international norms of conduct, would have some influence, smacked of residual Rooseveltian idealism, but the goal was to make clear that border changes by force would not be acceptable. Recall this was the moment when some of the world's fiercest nationalists came out of the Communist deep freeze. This was the period when vendors in Budapest and Zagreb were selling maps of greater Hungary and greater Croatia.
Bush's belief in the importance of a grand coalition passed its greatest test when five Iraqi oil tankers were spotted steaming to Yemen on August 18 in violation of the UN embargo. Each of Bush's advisers, including Colin Powell, and with the exception of Jim Baker advocated firing on the tankers. Baker, who was negotiating with the Soviets, asked for time to get the Soviets behind a UN embargo with teeth, which he felt would be impossible if the US Navy fired first. Baker wanted the Soviets to agree to a UN resolution that permitted "all means necessary" to enforce the blockade of Iraq. Bush wavered but accepted the argument and gave Baker 7 days to get the Kremlin's approval. It was at this moment that Maggie Thatcher, who wanted the US to attack the Iraqi ships, said "this is no time to go wobbly, George." He ignored that taunt and Baker and Gorbachev delivered. The tankers got to the port of Aden in Yemen but the US had tied up Saddam's main patron in an enforceable UN blockade. Bush explained the rationale behind his decision in his diary, [the Soviets] want some standing, some face, and it's so important in the world . . . if they see us go rushing in carrying the ball and they have no role, then they just look like bit players or unimportant."
A similarly grudging acceptance of realities, can be seen in Bush's aims in the Gulf War. I am convinced that George Bush had two war aims, one public and one private. Getting Iraq out of Kuwait was the public goal; getting Saddam out of the Presidential Palace in Baghdad was his private goal. He was convinced--and his advisers believed this and moderate Arabs in the region believed this--that Saddam Hussein would not survive the war in power. Bush's diary shows that by the fall of 1990 he was so disgusted by reports of Iraqi atrocities, many of which proved to be untrue it must be added, that he was determined to get rid of Saddam. Indeed, Bush become so impatient to do something that he contemplated a similar strategy to what FDR had attempted as a way of drawing Adolf Hitler into war. In the fall of 1990, Bush very nearly ordered a rescue mission to retrieve US diplomats in Kuwait City, in the hope of drawing fire.
On October 17, he wrote in his diary, "the news is saying some members of Congress feel I might use a minor incident to go to war, and they may be right." he confided to his diary on October 17. Bush began to ask about a daring air rescue of the 130 U.S. diplomats and Embassy personnel under Iraqi guard in Kuwait City. Bush assumed that the Iraqis would fire on U.S. helicopters and that this could be the trigger for a massive American air attack. "I'm not sure where our country is. But if they saw a clear provocation, and I think that would include unwillingness to permit us to get our [embassy] people out of Kuwait, they would be supportive of knocking the hell out of this guy. We can do it from the air. Our military is waffling and vacillating in terms of what we can do on the ground.
Bush's realism was never more reluctant that in his handling of his second war aim, getting rid of Saddam, once the shooting began. "Still no feeling of euphoria," Bush confided to his diary on February 28, the day after the 100-hour ground war ended. "He's got to go. . . . Obviously when the troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 casualties and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know." U.S. policy toward the defeated Iraqi military reflected this hope. Schwarzkopf was very respectful when he met with Iraqi generals at Safwan to discuss the terms of the ceasefire. When the Iraqi side asked to use helicopters to resupply their forces scattered around the country, the American commander agreed.
There is no evidence that Bush's war council, the Gang of Eight, ever considered marching to Baghdad. Although they all hoped for regime change in 1991, what they were looking for was a military coup d'etat led by a pliant Sunni general. When the Shi'a and the Kurdish uprisings began, British intelligence pressed for US covert action. The Bush administration debated the matter but concluded that Iraq was destined to be an autocracy. Having just seen US Marines die at the hands of Hezbollah due to the Reagan administration's pointless policy in Lebanon, Bush agreed with his advisers that Iraq would be an even worse tangle than Lebanon. So, while he publicly cheered the success of his policy, Bush was privately disappointed. He had wanted Saddam out; but the costs of doing so were too high and the consequences too unpredictable to make the decision wise.
So far as the world knew, the US had completely succeeded in the Gulf War. Our country left the Gulf War with more soft power than it had had since the liberation of France began in 1944. The US was considered an honest broker by Arab and Israeli alike; the emergent democracies of the post-Soviet empire rushed to imitate us. The cost was the containment of Saddam, but to the Bush 41 team that was a small price to pay. And as subsequent events have shown, it was.
Bush's realism extended to his handling of the S & L crisis and the budget deficit issue. There he stood up to those whose Panglossian policies were bankrupting this great land.
It is interesting to compare Bush with Reagan. There were at least four phases of Reagan's foreign policy: (1981-83); (1983-84); (1985-86); (1987-89). The president remained the same but the focus of his foreign policy shifted. Why? Because, I would argue, of the importance of the interplay of Reagan's advisers. With Bush 41 you see a consistent approach to foreign policy over four years. In 2000 Democrats and Republicans agreed on little else that whatever his other traits George W. Bush would at least have a solid foreign policy team that would steer foreign policy as successfully as under his father. But we have learned the lesson in the last seven years that historians have learned in comparing Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. The advisors may stay the same but if the president is different the policy is likely to be different. The most decisive element in White House decision making is the character and preferences of the president. George H. W. Bush's advisers rarely agreed. Even though they had been friendly since the Ford administration, these men viewed international affairs quite differently. Baker and Cheney defined the two extremes in the advice that Bush received on Gorbachev, for example. Baker sought maximum tactical flexibility to work with the Soviet leader whereas Cheney assumed that Gorbachev would fail, wanted to let him fail, and hoped to take advantage of Soviet weakness. Scowcroft was always somewhere in the middle, leaving President Bush holding the balance of power. What made the system work was that once Bush made his decision it was almost always loyally followed. None of his advisers can be said to have dominated the big calls: Baker did not want to go to war in Iraq; Scowcroft did not agree to the compromises Bush was willing to make to get Germany in NATO; Cheney had wanted to dump Gorbachev all along and thought going to Congress for a resolution to go to war with Iraq was a mistake. The common thread to all of these decisions was the first President Bush.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest realist as president, understood the limits of power. In 1863, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase wrote Lincoln to press him to extend the Emancipation Proclamation to "certain parts" of Virginia and Louisiana that had originally been exempted. Lincoln said no and in so doing explained a theory of government that balanced power and principle. "The original proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure," he wrote to Chase in September of that year. "The exemptions were made because the military necessity did not apply to the exempted localities. Nor does necessity apply to them now any more than it did then. If I take the step must I not do so, without the argument of military necessity, and so, without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right? Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless filed of absolutism? Could this pass unnoticed, or unresisted?"
Bush was no Lincoln. But like our greatest foreign policy presidents, Bush understood that limits do exist. He understood that legitimacy and coalitions could be force multipliers. The America, like presidents, cannot go it alone. This is not dewey eyed idealism. This is the hard-headed realism that led Truman, Marshall and Acheson to create NATO, that convinced John F. Kennedy not to use force and to involve the OAS in the blockade during the Cuban missile crisis, that led to Nixon and Kissinger's triangular diplomacy in the 1970s and Reagan and George Shultz's pocketing of gains in 1987-1988.
Americans are generally reluctant realists. Making choices based on assessment of power and recognizing limits is difficult for leaders of a country with a revolutionary heritage, an exceptionalist streak and boundless optimism bred in the bone. The foreign policy leader who applied realism with the most gusto, Henry Kissinger, saw himself more as the product of the European tradition of statecraft than of what some have called our "soulcraft." The elder George Bush did not relish saying "wait" to the Lithuanians, or "no" the Iraqi Shi'a. He was not happy that Saddam had defied predictions and stayed in power. And he had hoped that the flexible freeze might work at home--not his most realistic moment. But when push came to shove, he made decisions based on larger considerations of national interest within a broader strategic calculus that tied ends to means. Most great American realists are reluctant, but that does not make them any less great when they are president.
