The Misleading Bush Legacy: Nicholas Kitchen on Libertas

Before Enduring America was launched, our academic partner Libertas had a running set of commentaries on the attempt by Bush Administration officials and some supportive academics to enshrine a "Bush legacy" which a President Obama would follow.

As the Obama Administration settles in, a lot of that literature has already made its way to the filing drawer of history. Still, the rationalisation lingers: just last week The Wall Street Journal was crowing that Obama's decision to revive military commissions at Guantanamo Bay showed he was following Dubya's grand footsteps.

It's opportune, therefore, that Libertas returns with an analysis by Nicholas Kitchen of the London School of Economics on "Historical Revisionism and George Bush":

President Obama is attempting to return the United States to an internationalist position that is coherent with American diplomatic traditions. The fact that he has to move so far, and convince so many people that the United States is indeed prepared to return to the table, shows that the initial assessment of Bush Administration was correct - an outlier in the American diplomatic tradition. The revisionists have it wrong.

Read rest of analysis....

Comments

[Dave]

"The Bush administration’s actual foreign policy, at least until 2005, was one that simultaneously combined withdrawal from the world, and a determined undermining of the institutions of the American system, with imperial world-making. The nearest one can come to a similar kind of policy is the progressive imperialism around the time of the Spanish-American War, but there are no correlates of this type of isolationist-imperialism since the United States became a great power."
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But there were some internationalist elements in the Bush administration's foreign policy from 9/12/01 to spring 2003. Bush's many overtures to America's allies (France and Germany in particular) to galvanize broad European support for the war backfired, but also fractured Europe (remember Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga vs. Franco-German axis). The US took any and all support it could get. Also, Bush did not completely sideline the UN. He eventually gave the ICC the green light to prosecute prepetrators in the Darfur killings. He had to support the UN there because it was politically impossible to ignore it.

I enjoyed the article.