Like him or not, Doug Wead reflected to reporters last weekend, United States President George Bush was going to be ”a huge historical figure”. It was therefore legitimate, Wead thought, to release secret tapes he had made of his old friend’s private conversations. Whether Wead, a former aide to George Bush Snr, was right or wrong is a separate issue, but he was spot-on about one thing. Bush is a big figure all right.
Watching and listening to Bush in Brussels this week it was impossible not to see that this is a very different politician from the one who was taped by Wead as he weighed his first run for the White House in the late 1990s. ”It’s me versus the world,” the then Texas governor told Wead. ”The good news is, the world is on my side. Or more than half of it anyway.”
That cockiness, so irksome to so many for so long, and so destructive, is gone now, or is perhaps more skilfully concealed. In any event, there was a new maturity about Bush this week that we deny at our peril.
Let’s admit the limitations of Monday’s speech straight away. In 32 minutes, Bush covered more than a dozen difficult world and regional issues. Some of what he said about some of those issues was pretty perfunctory, inevitable in such a wide-ranging, almost scattergun, address. There was not much on Africa, and barely a mention of Asia. The section on Afghanistan was thin.
Much of what he did say was held together by constructive ambiguity. In the meatiest section of the speech, the part dealing with the Middle East, Bush’s clear willingness to engage and to encourage others to engage — important changes of position — was vitiated by the number of conditions, spoken and unspoken, that he clearly attaches to the US’s own role. Of the three most difficult issues between the US and Europe — Iran, China and Nato — Bush addressed only the first.
All the same, this was a very serious speech. Bush did nothing like it in his first term. It was a genuine effort to engage, which only the wilful will dismiss. While the passages on the Middle East will rightly absorb much of the instant analysis, we should not overlook some of the important conciliatory messages to Europe and, in particular, what Bush had to say about Russia. Imprecise the broad statements about the Arab world may have been too, but they can still be construed as a genuine existential challenge to many regimes from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.
The easiest and most obvious thing to say about the US president’s trip to Brussels is that it was a fence-mending visit: to stress the newly harmonious mood music from the White House last week, point to the courtesies being observed towards the European Union, and remark on the change of Bush’s tone.
The nearly as easy and nearly as obvious thing to say is that the visit was stronger on style than it was on substance. Beneath the surface smiles and handshakes are some serious and unresolved disagreements, and these speak to a wider divergence of interests since 1989 between Europe, pragmatic, prosperous and peaceable, and the US, driven, power-focused and under attack, as the mutual self-interest of the Cold War gradually fades.
But there is, perhaps, a subtler and a truer thing to say. This is that there is potentially much more to the reconciliatory mood and stage management of the Bush visit than the sceptics allow. The transatlantic reconvergence, in other words, is for real. The problem is that its purpose remains both unstated and, even to those closest to the process, somewhat unclear.
Much of this is summed up in the current transitional fluidity over the politics of Iraq. The war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome that would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects.
The deeper question now, however, is whether the Bush administration has a strategy that will connect the detailed agenda at which the Brussels speech obviously hints with the powerful rhetoric behind which the president so often hides. There was little in the Brussels speech to compare with the talk in his inauguration last month about the ”untamed fire of freedom”.
But what does Bush actually intend to do? That is the question that rises to the top of the agenda. British diplomats will delight that this week’s speech proves Bush’s willingness to engage — every word of it was supportive of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s often derided belief in Bush’s good faith — but even London is not really convinced that the president is prepared to stay the course. Bush may have said more than he has ever said before about the Middle East, for example, but he has yet to prove whether he is willing to twist arms and dominate the end game.
There is a sense, some British observers say, that Bush himself is hesitant. It was like this in the first Bush term — until 9/11, they add. After 9/11, the administration did not need to ask. Right now, they seem to be waiting for another 9/11 to show them the direction in which to travel, says someone in a position to know. But how can a policy depend on such a possibility?
If that is right, then the real problem about Bush is not that he is the world’s self-appointed sheriff, the traditional first-term charge. The problem is that he remains uncommitted about how best to deploy American power in any situation other than a perceived emergency. And it is not just Europeans who are saying this.
Some say that this reflects an unresolved struggle between the administration’s ideologues and its pragmatists. Perhaps so. Yet the pragmatists seem to be in the ascendant.
And if that is right, then the real issue is not whether the Bush who was in Brussels this week is the real Bush. It is whether the real Bush now has the will to give the rebuilding process the attention it requires. Is he, as John Lewis Gaddis challenges him in Foreign Affairs, prepared to shift from the shock and awe of his first term to ”the reassurance — and the attention to detail — that is necessary to sustain any new [international] system”.
Is he able, as Gaddis puts it, to be a Bismarck? In which case the really important question is not why Bush has come to Europe. It is when he will be coming again, and when he will go to the Middle East. A huge historical figure? That is what we are about to discover. — Â