Off the Island
Former Clinton administration official Kurt Campbell guest blogs on the New York Times about the difference in approach between George W. Bush and both of his predecessors:
Indeed, the 1990’s involved enormous and important good works internationally and helped set the scene for continued American power on the global stage. Increasingly, the first Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration can be seen in retrospect as essentially fitting together to complete a decade of accomplishment that paints President George W. Bush’s subsequent term in office as an outlier.
Together, Bush 41 and Clinton labored to create a new Europe through three essential efforts, notably the multifaceted elements associated with the unification of Germany, the creation of new institutions like the Partnership for Progress (PFP) and NATO expansion that knitted the newly free states of Central and Eastern Europe into the security mechanisms of the West, and the belated but ultimately successful efforts to stand up to ethnic cleansing and Balkan outrages in Bosnia and Kosovo. North Korean nuclear efforts were at least delayed and largely stymied. The United States deployed aircraft carriers to the western Pacific to send a clear message of resolve and resolution to the Chinese leadership in the midst of their military saber-rattling against Taiwan.
Nafta was implemented to improve hemispheric trade and American competitiveness to rising Asian manufacturing challenges. Saddam Hussein, despite the railings of the neo-cons both then and now, looks with the benefit of hindsight to have been effectively contained. President Clinton also took the politically difficult route of trying to equip and prepare the American people for the enormous challenges and opportunities wrought by globalization. (A recent survey underscores this reality: While President Clinton gave numerous speeches on globalization and uttered the term for the public record nearly a thousand times, President Bush has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the term, uttering it only on a handful of occasions.)
Clinton’s Treasury Department repeatedly navigated the over-heated global economy through the dangerous shoals of the Asian financial crisis and the Mexican peso devaluation. Perhaps most importantly, Presidents Bush and Clinton combined to restore fiscal responsibility and put in place the financial preconditions for an economic renaissance that is virtually unmatched in American history. What’s more, the armed forces that the Republicans claimed were so mismanaged, resource-starved and overstretched during the Clinton years responded famously during the Afghanistan campaign and early phase of the Iraq invasion. Certainly there were profound failures in Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere, but overall hardly a holiday from history, as some would have us believe.
Today, Republican candidates for president tread carefully when it comes to criticizing George W. Bush so as not to offend the loyalists who show up in primaries. Once the standard-bearer is chosen, President Bush won’t be able to tell which party’s nominee is speaking when he hears one describing the foreign policy debacle of the last 8 years.
