CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
Ensuring a Legacy
Kim R. Holmes
Abstract
After September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush set forth on a revolutionary approach to U.S. foreign policy. There was a tremendous sense of urgency and an assumption that the old way of doing things had not worked. The strategy of pursuing stability and of slowly working problems through the half-measured process of multilateral diplomacy had not prevented a direct attack on American soil. New strategies and measures were needed to deal with a drastically new and different world. The president moved determinedly to topple the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, to aggressively challenge the rogue regimes of Iran and North Korea, to shift the focus of alliance policies toward Japan and Central and Eastern European countries, to expand the range of military, law enforcement and diplomatic activities to fight the war on terrorism, and finally to adopt his now-famous freedom and democracy agenda aimed (in large measure) at the Middle East.
Many in the Bush Administration thought their various strategies in support of the “long war” on terrorism, including the freedom agenda and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy”, would usher in a sea change not only in U.S. policy but in international affairs—not unlike the role of the Truman presidency in establishing a new framework for U.S. foreign policy and the containment policy that endured under Eisenhower and indeed for decades and brought victory in the Cold War.
Now, with two years remaining in his presidency, the administration faces the question of whether it can institutionalize its new approach to foreign policy.