By TigerHawk at 11/02/2005 03:59:00 PM
(Via email, while flying from Chicago to San Diego)
Stratfor's email of last night considers the geopolitical impact on the United States of President Bush's current political weakness. As any newshound knows, after a summer and fall of soaring gasoline prices, sustained casualties in Iraq, the destruction of New Orleans, the Plame investigation, and the Miers nomination, Bush's approval ratings have fallen to roughly 40 percent. This is the lowest level of his presidency, and it makes it difficult for Bush to get anything done. It also creates an opportunity for America's enemies -- who see a window to exploit transient American indecisiveness -- and a conundrum for America's allies and rivals, who can be expected to behave quite differently when an American president is weak at home. Friends, foes and rivals know that a weak presidency is an indecisive presidency. If one doubts this, look no further than the Clinton administration's tepid responses to al Qaeda's attacks during the last years of his presidency, notwithstanding the claimed warnings of Richard Clarke.
Bush's weakness may be permanent, or it may be ephemeral. Presidents have recovered from worse. Of these various troubles, the Miers nomination posed the greatest threat to Bush's core political strength because it threatened to fracture the social conservatives. They are Bush's last reliable supporters, since "business" conservatives are rattled by his large budget deficits and "national security" conservatives are increasingly unhappy with the open-ended commitment in Iraq (at least in light of Bush's unwillingness to spread the burden of the war by significantly increasing the size of the military). The Alito nomination, therefore, is calculated to energize the core social conservative base and restore operational flexibility to the Bush presidency. If Bush achieves Alito's confirmation, the story will change to reflect the enormous impact that Bush has had on the Supreme Court. The Democrats are going to fight Alito tooth and nail because their own activist base will not allow them to do otherwise, but therein lies a trap: when Alito is confirmed, and he probably will be, the perceived magnitude of the Bush victory will only increase with the intensity of the opposition to it. The bigger the victory, the more profound the restoration of his popularity and the power of his presidency.
If this scenario does not unfold into a Bush victory -- if, for example, the Democrats defeat Alito or some new crisis changes the terms of the debate again -- we will suffer even more foreign policy reversals. Recent momentum in the "six party" talks with North Korea may flag, and Iranian sabre-rattling and defiance might metastesize into even more aggressiveness in Iraq and further deployments of Hezbollah against the American agenda in the Middle East. Russia will resolve its various competing agendas -- its desire to expand its influence south of the Caspian in both Iran and Iraq, its interest in containing American influence in central Asia, and its own fundamental alliance with the United States against the jihadis -- less favorably toward American interests if it believes that defiance of the United States will bear no costs. Even the government of Ariel Sharon will be less likely to heed American warnings if it knows that the Bush administration has no political margin.
(Prediction alert) Opponents of the Bush administration -- including especially people who secretly or openly long for American decline -- will characterize looming strategic defeats as evidence of structural American geopolitical weakness. We will learn a lot about the true feelings of many of the prospective candidates for the presidency in 2008 if we listen closely to the tone of these characterizations. Those who sound triumphant in citing American foreign policy defeats cannot be trusted in the office. Those who sound frustrated and sad can at least be taken seriously. If history is useful for predicting history in the making, however, all diagnoses of structural American weakness will be wrong, or at least very premature. We have seen this story before. Stratfor:
The rest of the world is sensing this weakness. They have long experience with the American political cycle and its periodic weakening of the president. They understand that, despite the objective power of the United States, internal constraints frequently tie the president's hands -- limiting his ability to act or to change the pattern of his actions. These cycles can last from months to several years, but they are not permanent. They do, however, open important windows of opportunity.
The obvious example is the Nixon-Ford presidency and Vietnam, but the weakness extended into the Carter presidency as well. As events in Iran and Afghanistan transpired, options that might have been available under other circumstances were not available to Carter. Indeed, except for the perception that political circumstances precluded the United States from taking certain actions, it is not clear that either the Iranian revolutionaries or the Soviet Union would have behaved in exactly the manner they did. They were able to exploit the temporary situation to their benefit.
The United States is enormously powerful, and viewed within the context of a century, these periodic paralyses are not decisive. It has been established that Woodrow Wilson was unable to control U.S. foreign policy after World War I. Roosevelt could not act as early as he would have liked on World War II, and others were unable to keep control in Vietnam and Iran. But these substantial moments of paralysis and failure did not define the main trajectory of U.S. power -- which consistently increased throughout the century. To those who doubt this premise, consider the fate of Japan and Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There were those -- Henry Kissinger included -- who were prepared to argue that the United States was a declining power after Vietnam. The decline is hardly visible 30 years later.
This, I think, is the critical observation. Along most dimensions -- economic, political, cultural and military -- American power and influence is growing, not shrinking, relative to the total. A few years of mere weakness in any American presidency is unlikely to affect that long term trend. Weakness today may make life painful for a while and require future wars to recover ground lost in the near term, but transient presidential weakness cannot in and of itself undermine America's great strength, which is its bottomless capacity to reinvent itself. No other country or culture -- not the great Asian powers rising to fill the void left by Europe's geopolitical implosion over the last 90 years, and certainly not Islam -- adapts the way Americans do. We will remain strong as long as we preserve our national love of change. No matter what happens to President Bush's approval ratings.
TH - I'm not even so sure our "allies" are terribly deterred by Bush's approval ratings. Near as I can tell, they are coming to align with us on Syria, Lebanon and Iran. They are aligned with us on North Korea. Generally, the UN has been discredited as an entity by the failure to enforce its pronouncements coupled with its blatant and staggering corruption. We're making progress with Europe on trade talks and made some unprecedented offers oriented toward reducing farm subsidies....all big stuff.
Bush's approval ratings, while low for the Presidency, aren't low compared to other second termers and, besides, he doesn't have to run again. While approval ratings did matter to Clinton, a guy who desperately sought approval, I don't think GWB gives a tinker's damn.
To me it's laughable when you consider that Iraq has been settled as a military matter and is rapidly settling as a political matter as well. The more intriguing areas now are Iran and Syria. I think the only thing holding back the administration from more decisive action there at his very moment is a combination of 1) patiently waitng for allies and 2) the November 2006 election cycle.
I think maybe sometimes we reader/blogger types pay too much heed to this stuff....
Cardinalpark, at
Wed Nov 02, 04:50:00 PM:
, at
Thu Nov 06, 07:08:00 AM:
