What we know for certain about President Bush is that he is a man of very limited gifts. Even in politics, the only arena besides being a college cheerleader where he has found sucess, he is a one-trick pony. He knows how to conduct slash-and-burn, smoke-and-mirrors campaigns, and that’s it.
Fortunately, his bag of Rovian tricks won’t work in the international arena, so — unfortunately for the future of the United States — is he bereft of ideas — much less solutions — for dealing with international crises, which are too big and complex to dodge or obfuscate with spin and stage management:
the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There’s virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.
As near as I can tell, George Bush has learned that “There’s evil in the world and we’re going to stand up to it” isn’t really adequate as a foreign policy for a superpower but is unable to figure out anything better to replace it with. So he spins his wheels, waiting for 2009. Unfortunately, the rest of us are left spinning with him.
Jon, It is like you said. There is no policy. I heard an interesting piece on BBC tonight. An interview in with someone is Spain. He stated Spain had been dealing with terrorism for 40 years. He stated “war on terrorism” was fuel to the fire. Spain had used monitoring of laws, education on tolerance, and not over reaction. The piece implied the protocol had been successful, not paralizing (injecting my own words here) like the US response.