Cowboy Diplomacy

It was a flip-flop of monumental proportions. After failing to uncover Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration changed its tune. No longer were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) the causus belli. Instead, Iraq had been invaded with “regime change”—the violent overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’athist dictatorship—as the goal. Critics scoffed at the time at ex post facto change of objective, but now, just over two years after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 2, 2003, it seems that the man from Crawford might actually be intent on spreading democracy across the world.

In a speech in Latvia’s capital, Riga, on Saturday, Bush expressed regret for America’s complicity in the 1945 Yalta pact that divided Europe into spheres of influence between the Western allies and the Soviet Union. The president even went so far as to compare the deal, struck by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by western governments before the World War II, and to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

In an extraordinary move, Bush, on a tour of Europe to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the World War II on the continent, made little mention of the 1945 defeat of the Nazi regime. He focused instead on the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe by Soviet troops after the war’s conclusion. The president’s comments came as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wrote in a French newspaper that his government would not give in to demands from Baltic countries for an apology for Soviet domination during the Cold War.

The president didn’t stop there, either. In comments that seemed bound to irk Putin, whom Bush visited on Sunday as part of his European trip, the president called for free elections in Belarus, whose president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, is among Putin’s remaining friends in Eastern Europe, where former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, are turning westward in increasing numbers.

Bush’s very public pro-democracy stance on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is not likely to win friends in Moscow, where, last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that President Putin had become too powerful and ought to respect democracy. It does, however, demonstrate great apparent consistency in the president’s foreign policy. It seems that George W. Bush might actually be genuinely committed to spreading democracy to those corners of the world in which it is foreign. In that effort, Bush has shown himself ready to break the informal rules of international diplomacy; his decision in 2003 to give up on a second U.N. resolution authorizing force in Iraq speaks to that readiness. His “cowboy diplomacy,” however, seems to be working. Iraq has held free elections. Syria has removed its occupying force from Lebanon. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has pledged to hold multi-party elections in the near future. And last week, Bush took advantage of his trip to Eastern Europe to spead his pro-democracy message there. In the first year of his second term, America’s 43rd president appears to have found his legacy issue.

President Bush has found himself a just cause for which to fight across the world and has presented a set of ideals and foreign policy objectives that are, at first glance, in line with his post bellum Iraqi regime change objective. The true test of the president’s consistency, and his ability to be successful in his cavalier style of foreign policy, has not yet come. During his visit to Moscow on Sunday, Bush and Putin were strictly convivial, with the Russian president letting his American colleague take his prized 1956 Volga GAZ-21 sedan for a spin around the presidential compound. As Bush’s apparent hard line on Russian democracy appeared to dissolve into simply a difference in interpretation of history, Bush-watchers were left with important questions: Is the president really as serious about spreading democracy as he claims to be? Will he apply his democratic doctrine to the authoritarian regimes in Havana and Pyongyang, Rangoon and Riyadh? Will he put America’s money where his mouth is and encourage worldwide democracy with rhetorical carrots as well as sticks? The president has three more years in office during which he will have to answer these questions.

Like him or hate him, President Bush has begun to show the potential for real consistency in his foreign policy. For the sake of his place in history, we can only hope that the president can keep up appearances for remainder of his term.

After all, nobody likes a flip-flopper.

Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.