Gerald F. Seib: Obama Abroad Mirrors Bush Senior
[Gerald F. Seib is an assistant managing editor and the executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal.]
President Barack Obama and his aides talk a lot about how his approach to the world is different from George W. Bush's. What they say less often is that his approach has a fair amount in common with that of another Bush -- the first president by that name, George H.W. Bush.
Slowly but surely, Mr. Obama is molding a foreign policy that harkens back more to the President Bush who managed the end of the Cold War than to his son, the President Bush who managed the aftermath of a deadly terrorist strike on the U.S.
For the elder President Bush, the hallmarks of foreign policy were a preference for pragmatism and stability over idealism and risk; an emphasis on multilateralism over unilateralism; and a willingness to work with leaders the world provides rather than the ones America might prefer.
Many of those hallmarks can be seen in President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama's announcement had none of the lofty rhetoric about spreading democracy or transforming Afghanistan that might have come from the younger President Bush. Instead, the emphasis was on stabilizing Afghanistan rather than really fixing it -- a less-idealistic approach that might have been expected of Bush the elder.
There also was heavy emphasis on making the Afghan surge international rather than unilateral -- hence, the hard push for allies to simultaneously add to their troop levels -- another hallmark of the first Bush's approach. And there was a quick-in, quick-out, limited-goals formula to his Afghanistan strategy. That mirrors the first President Bush's decision to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991 and stop the operation there, rather than moving on to Baghdad to oust Saddam Hussein.
It's striking that while Mr. Obama is often criticized for an overemphasis on soaring rhetoric and an excess of ambition in his domestic agenda, his Afghanistan announcement was marked by the opposite -- also mirroring foreign-policy pronouncements by the elder President Bush...
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President Barack Obama and his aides talk a lot about how his approach to the world is different from George W. Bush's. What they say less often is that his approach has a fair amount in common with that of another Bush -- the first president by that name, George H.W. Bush.
Slowly but surely, Mr. Obama is molding a foreign policy that harkens back more to the President Bush who managed the end of the Cold War than to his son, the President Bush who managed the aftermath of a deadly terrorist strike on the U.S.
For the elder President Bush, the hallmarks of foreign policy were a preference for pragmatism and stability over idealism and risk; an emphasis on multilateralism over unilateralism; and a willingness to work with leaders the world provides rather than the ones America might prefer.
Many of those hallmarks can be seen in President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama's announcement had none of the lofty rhetoric about spreading democracy or transforming Afghanistan that might have come from the younger President Bush. Instead, the emphasis was on stabilizing Afghanistan rather than really fixing it -- a less-idealistic approach that might have been expected of Bush the elder.
There also was heavy emphasis on making the Afghan surge international rather than unilateral -- hence, the hard push for allies to simultaneously add to their troop levels -- another hallmark of the first Bush's approach. And there was a quick-in, quick-out, limited-goals formula to his Afghanistan strategy. That mirrors the first President Bush's decision to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991 and stop the operation there, rather than moving on to Baghdad to oust Saddam Hussein.
It's striking that while Mr. Obama is often criticized for an overemphasis on soaring rhetoric and an excess of ambition in his domestic agenda, his Afghanistan announcement was marked by the opposite -- also mirroring foreign-policy pronouncements by the elder President Bush...