Israel Matzav

George Herbert Walker Obama?

Earlier this week, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel compared President Obama to George H.W. Bush (also known as Bush 41 or Bush, the father) on foreign policy.

Foreign Policy (the blog) asked several academics what they thought of Emanuel's comparison. Here are a few of their answers.

Robert Kagan
Senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

I will leave it to the self-described realists to explain in greater detail the origins and meaning of "realism" and "realpolitik" to our confused journalists and politicos. But here is what realism is not: It is not a plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons through common agreement by all the world's powers. And it is not a foreign policy built on the premise that if only the United States reduces its nuclear arsenal, this will somehow persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program, or persuade China and other reluctant nations in the world to redouble their pressure on Iran to do so. That is idealism of a high order. It is a 21st-century Wilsonian vision. And it is precisely the kind of idealism that realists in the middle of the 20th century rose up to challenge. Realists would point out that the divergent interests of the great powers, not to mention those of Iran, will not be affected in the slightest by marginal cuts in American and Russian nuclear forces.

The confusion no doubt stems from the fact that President Obama is attempting to work with autocratic governments to achieve his ends. But that does not make him Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger pursued diplomacy with China, it was to gain strategic leverage over the Soviet Union. When he sought détente with the Soviets, it was to gain breathing space for the United States after Vietnam. Right or wrong, that was "realpolitik." Global nuclear disarmament may or may not be a worthy goal, but it is nothing if not idealistic.

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Danielle Pletka
Vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute

There is a certain weird irony in the Obama administration's efforts to portray the U.S. president as the successful son George H.W. Bush never had. In 2008, before Rahm Emanuel labeled his boss more "realpolitik, like Bush 41," the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne memorably announced that in "electing Barack Obama, the country traded the foreign policy of the second President Bush for the foreign policy of the first President Bush."

Those eager to take a cheap shot would remember that among the hallmarks of George H. W. Bush's foreign policy were (hmmm) antipathy to Israel, an eagerness to kowtow to creepy dictators, and a lack of the "vision thing" that will forever relegate him to being that guy Americans elected because they couldn't give Ronald Reagan another term.

But Barack Obama isn't a realpolitician, and I fear he does indeed have a vision. Obama has embraced the foreign policy of an ideologue, a worshipper at the altar of American decline. The framework seems a simple repudiation of American global leadership, a devaluation of alliances, and a penchant for paper agreements and empty dialogue that articulate grand aims (Disarmament! Global zero! Proximity talks!) but ignore the practical threats to the United States that exist in the real world.

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Peter Feaver
Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science at Duke University; contributing editor to Foreign Policy and blogger at Shadow Government

Emanuel's quote is puzzling. President Obama may be more "realpolitik" than George W. Bush in the sense that he has downgraded the place of human rights and support for democracy in his foreign policy. But it is certainly not "realpolitik" to slight the personal relationships of presidential diplomacy -- and it would be hard to identify something more unlike George H.W. Bush than this feature of the Obama approach to foreign policy. In any case, the rewards for this alleged "realpolitik" turn are still hard to measure. President Obama is significantly more popular with the general publics in the other great powers (except possibly in Asia), but if measured cold-bloodedly by American "self-interest," the last President Bush had at least as good and probably more effective and cooperative relations with the governments of those great powers (except possibly with Russia). Relations with Britain, China, France, Germany, India, and Japan were more troubled in 2009 than they were in 2008.

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Michael Lind
Policy director for the economic growth program at the New America Foundation; author of The American Way of Strategy

Rahm Emanuel is right. In many areas, ranging from his caution about escalating the war in Afghanistan to his firm approach to Israel, Barack Obama shows more affinities with the moderate Republican realist tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and the first Bush than with the Cold War liberal tradition of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson that spawned the neoconservative combination of hawkishness and crusading rhetoric. This reflects not only Obama's worldview but also the migration into the Democratic Party of many former moderate Republican voters. Their influence is seen as much in the Democratic health-care bill, which rejects New Deal-style social democracy for an approach of subsidizing private insurance that Eisenhower and Nixon pioneered, as in the Obama administration's cost-conscious, realist foreign policy.

I didn't particularly care for George H.W. Bush, but I cannot see him going on a worldwide apology tour and bowing to world leaders, nor can I see him being afraid to pull the trigger on Iran. In fact, the only foreign policy area in which this comparison seems valid is that Bush 41 was also hard on Israel.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:29 PM