Most importantly, the next president will want to broaden American foreign policy from its preoccupation with the “war on terror”. The Olympic games in Beijing this summer will remind Americans of China's growing economic might, at a time when America is nervous about its own economic performance and faces powerful protectionist pressures at home. Russia's growing authoritarianism and assertiveness is also bound to pose a big strategic problem.
Even so, the issues that dominated the Bush presidency will not go away. Defeating radical Islam will remain a mainspring of American policy. Al-Qaeda still seems determined to inflict massive casualties on America's civilian population. It is still powerful and continues to pursue biological and even nuclear weapons. The president's first job is to protect the American people from attack, so al-Qaeda will remain an overriding worry.
A Democratic president might bring a change of strategy to the “war on terror”, with less martial rhetoric and a shift of focus from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mr Obama is saying that America should be fighting terrorism (but in Iraq it has chosen the wrong battlefield). He has expressed his willingness to go after high-value al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan without the permission of Pakistan's government,
something that Mr Bush refused to do. The Bush administration itself is already toning down its rhetoric and trying harder to work with local elites and use non-military tools. There would be more of this under a Democratic president.
Whoever wins, America's foreign policy will continue to be bedevilled by three problems that Mr Bush has had to contend with. The first is partisanship at home. America will remain deeply divided about how to deal with radical Islam. Conservatives believe that this is the defining struggle of the age, whereas liberals see it as a hysterical response that will only add to the problem.
A Democratic president could find such partisanship particularly difficult to manage. The president will come under enormous pressure to bring America's troops home (see chart 2). He or she will also be expected to pursue a more conciliatory policy in the wider Middle East. But what happens if these twin goals prove difficult to reconcile? The president might be attacked from the left for selling out and from the right for not going far enough.
The second problem is that America disagrees with the rest of the world over dealing with the Middle East and radical Islam. Even
under a Democratic president America will take a harder line than Europe on al-Qaeda, Iran, Pakistan and Palestinian militants. And even in a sunnier diplomatic climate Europe will be reluctant to do more in Iraq or Afghanistan. Europe's elites are not rallying to America's side as they did during the cold war.
The third difficulty is that America is simply not devoting enough resources to dealing with the “war on terror”. The army is
severely overstretched. The Department of Homeland Security is a mess. The intelligence agencies have failed to adjust to the new threat from terrorism. America's schools and universities are not churning out nearly enough Arab-speakers.
Some commentators regard the war with extreme Islamism as the natural successor to the cold war—world war four, in the phrase of Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative. But
Americans are far more polarised over foreign policy than they were in the days of the cold war, and many are not prepared to devote large resources to dealing with the terrorist threat. The grand certainties of the Bush doctrine are being replaced not by a new consensus but by growing confusion about what to do about terrorism and how to weigh that threat against the other strategic problems America is facing.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Can the Bush doctrine last?
Mar 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Not in its present form, but nor will it disappear altogether
THE Bush doctrine is America's first attempt at a grand strategy since the end of the cold war. It consists of five interlocking parts:
• America is at war with global terrorism. This war demands that America deal with state sponsors of terrorism as well as terrorist networks.
• Attack is the best form of defence. America needs to act pre-emptively to prevent threats from materialising.
• America needs to preserve its freedom to act independently. Global bodies are too slow-moving to deal with terrorist threats.
• Success breeds success. The bold use of American power will encourage potential friends to join America and potential enemies to abandon their evil ways.
• The best solution to global jihadism is to export democracy. America needs to abandon its deals with authoritarian regimes and encourage democracy the world over.
This strategy drew on the powerful emotions provoked by September 11th, not least the shock of
vulnerability. America has been blessed by geography, protected by two oceanic moats and supported by two friendly neighbours. With the end of the cold war it looked as if it had been blessed by history as well. Then September 11th proved that a band of fanatics from a faraway country could strike at the very heart of American civilisation.
Yet despite this sense of vulnerability, Americans were also conscious of their country's vast power. The world's only remaining superpower had more military might than the 20 next most powerful countries combined. Surely all this raw power could eliminate the threat from terrorist networks and rogue states?
The Bush doctrine has been scorched in the flames of Iraq. Pre-emption? Iraq's WMD failed to
materialise, and the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime proved to be tenuous at best. Attack is the best form of defence? The invasion stoked up a powerful local insurgency, and America's travails in Iraq have emboldened the Iranians. The bandwagon effect? America's close allies have tried to distance themselves from the debacle in Iraq and the jihadists have got a foothold there.
Reuters
How not to do it
The Iraq war has damaged America's confidence in its hard power. The Bush administration
overestimated the threat from Saddam and underestimated the difficulty of invading an Arab country.
The administration went in with too few troops, despite Colin Powell's dire warnings, and failed to plan for the occupation. Intended to demonstrate the awesomeness of America's hard power, the Iraq war
exposed its limitations.
It also damaged America's sense of itself as a virtuous country, so benevolent and well-intentioned that it does not have to abide by global rules. The photographs of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib shocked
America as much as the rest of the world. A stack of naked prisoners piled on top of one another, a man with a hood over his head perched on a box and connected to electrical wires—how to reconcile these images with America's mission to bring democracy to a benighted land?
Nor was this just a matter of a few rogue guards behaving badly. Mr Bush's critics point to many official decisions that mocked America's claim to virtue, from the dismissal by Alberto Gonzales, then America's attorney-general, of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” to the Central Intelligence Agency's rendition of prisoners to countries that practise torture and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
Philip Gordon, of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, argues that the past six years have exposed the weakness of two ideas at the heart of the Bush doctrine: the “war on terror” and the “democracy
agenda”. Mr Gordon (who, as it happens, advises Barack Obama), argues that the “war on terror”
amounts to both poor analysis and poor strategy. It is poor analysis because it lumps together diverse threats that are often rooted in local squabbles. Radical Islam is divided into warring camps; Sunnis and Shias are engaged in a bitter power struggle, for example, and Iran and al-Qaeda are sworn enemies. It is poor strategy because the “war” forces these enemies together and prevents America from exploiting internal rivalries. The war metaphor also forecloses too many strategic options, favouring the use of force when co-operation with local leaders might be more productive.
Mr Gordon also has reservations about the democracy agenda. Democratisation can play into the hands of Islamic extremists such as Hamas (which has won Palestinian elections) and Hizbullah (which enjoys powerful popular support in Lebanon). And America's strategic interests in the Middle East may require it to preserve good relations with Sunni autocracies such as Saudi Arabia.
Mr Gordon's reservations are widely shared. A Public Agenda poll in 2006 found that only 20% of respondents agreed that spreading democracy to other countries was a “very important” goal of
American foreign policy. The Bush administration itself no longer seems to support the doctrine in full. Mr Bush has sacked or sidelined many of the people who were most closely associated with it, such as Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2005 the administration even rechristened the global war on terror to become the global struggle against violent extremism.
Shortly after the 2004 election Mr Bush went to Brussels to repair relations with the Europeans.
Condoleezza Rice, his new secretary of state, emphasised the importance of diplomacy and
multilateralism. She negotiated with the North Koreans. She also moderated her emphasis on promoting democracy. Having endorsed democratic reforms when she visited Egypt in 2005, she was silent on the subject on a return visit two years later.