Andrew Johnston: Canadians Should Beware Bush's Olive Branch

Andrew Johnston, in the Toronto Star (12-3-04):

[Andrew Johnston teaches American history at the University of Western Ontario and is currently serving as co-director of Western's Centre for American Studies]

The day before President George Bush touched down in Ottawa to announce his second-term foreign policy consisted of staying the course, a U.N.-appointed panel came to a troubling conclusion:

"There is little evident international acceptance," it argued, "of the idea of security being best preserved by a balance of power, or by any single - even benignly motivated - superpower."

The panel, which included Bush Sr.'s former National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft, concluded that "in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk of the global order ... is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action ... to be accepted."

The next day Bush congenially reached out to Canadians to say let bygones be bygones.

His trip to his northern neighbour was intended to not only mend fences, but, much more so, to give the president's kinder, gentler face a test drive before taking it to Europe.

It likely succeeded....

... Bush stated during his press conference that his re-election was a clear mandate for his foreign policy - the term "political capital" has become the buzzword of Washington.

There's no doubt the president acquired a solid mandate in November, but it certainly didn't reflect affection for his foreign policy.

Rightly or wrongly, it rested more on his support among cultural conservatives who liked his social values than on a grasp of what his foreign policy stands for.

In fact, a majority of Bush supporters in the election didn't actually know what his foreign policy vision was.

A poll compiled by the University of Maryland last October found that 58 per cent of Bush voters thought that if it was revealed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not been aiding Al Qaeda (as the 9/11 Commission concluded), the U.S. should not have gone to war.

Republicans coped with their cognitive dissonance by simply misreading what the 9/11 Commission said.

Bush supporters, the study could only conclude, needed to misrepresent Bush's foreign policy assumptions in order to preserve their support for a nation at war.

It went even deeper than that: Republican voters also misperceived the administration's positions on the Kyoto accord, the International Criminal Court, the land mine treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban.

Second, as sweet as it is of Bush to remember our beloved King, his genealogy of American foreign policy is askew.

The ancestors to George W. Bush's "just war" doctrine are not Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Some of the latter's sweeping moralism and insistence that the aim of U.S. foreign policy ought to be to convert the world to western democracy is there.

But the real inspirations are elsewhere.

After World War II had discredited isolationism in the United States, Republican nationalists reached out to other symbols of American power: a strong air force, nuclear superiority, a brief flirtation with preventive nuclear war, and a distaste for morally inferior allies.

The thinking was that America could dispense with multilateralism if it maintained enough military power to keep its enemies away from the United States.

Pre-emption isn't the child of Wilsonian internationalism, but of an impatient, nationalist desire to remake the world without the grubby work of cumbersome diplomacy and compromise.

The other intellectual wellspring for the neo-conservatives is widely believed to be political philosopher Leo Strauss.

The Bush administration is awash in Straussians (Leon Kass, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, to name a few) who, among other things, believe that true statesmanship entails overriding constitutional democracy and using Machiavellian instruments of deceit and autocracy to maintain all measure of social inequities.

There's no question most Canadians want a less fractious relationship with the United States and maybe even a more robust Pearsonian internationalism. But we might be wary of what we're signing onto in the name of economic prosperity and good feelings.