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....