The Foreign Service Journal, February 2007

ful supporters, there is no way to justify talking to, or even tolerating, the evil ones. That would be far too much realism for his base to accept; and without them, there would be no one left to try to write a version of history that is favorable to Bush. The same dilemma is true for Bush’s prospects in the rest of the Middle East. Christian conserva- tives see giving Israel a blank check as responding to a biblical injunc- tion and as an essential part of bringing about the second coming of Christ. The fact that their vision of the future is a scenario that includes all the Jews winding up dead or converted should be cold comfort for those who care about the Jewish state. All previous presidents since 1948 took the steps nec- essary to help guard Israel’s security and, at the same time, attempted to be an honest broker and advance the peace process. Bush instead declared Yasser Arafat evil, and refused to have anything to do with him. At least Arafat had the good grace to move on to his place in his- tory. But what was left behind was the rise of Hamas and the strong impression throughout the Arab world that Washington had no interest in the plight of the Palestinian people. If the Middle East is a mess, what about the prospects for foreign policy success in other parts of the world? Harvard historian Niall Ferguson summed up the panorama well in a recent commentary in the Washing- ton Post when he wrote: “Irrelevant in Latin America, impotent in the Middle East, ignored in Africa and iso- lated in Europe, Washington may be facing its biggest foreign policy crisis since the late 1970s.” Ferguson sees a world increasingly dominated by dangerous dema- gogues who often are able to finance their anti- Americanism through oil exports. Because of Iraq, we face this situation with our military badly overextended, lacking the trust of our allies and despised by a growing number of people around the globe. No part of the world looks ripe for a foreign policy breakthrough by Bush. Our interest in Latin America under him has been largely defined as signing trade agreements because that pleased the Republican busi- ness constituency. The Democrats, who are now the majority in both houses of Congress, look to the labor unions for votes and money. So they are not going to approve the pending agreements without greater protection for workers’ rights. Nor is it at all clear that such renegotiation is even possible, espe- cially because when the Republi- cans were in control they went out of their way to ignore the views of Democrats. But even in the unlike- ly event that the Democrats turn out to be less partisan than the Republicans were, a few trade agreements won’t provide the basis for a claim that Bush’s presidency was one of accomplishment. Our low standing in Latin America and elsewhere is due in no small part to the administration’s approaching foreign relations with the attitude that the opinion of for- eigners doesn’t matter. John Bolton was the perfect ambassador to the United Nations for the way he per- sonified administration policies. Both the envoy and his message were ignorant, arrogant and aggressive, and both help explain why an increasing number of Latin American politicians are running for office on a platform of anti-Americanism. For instance, when Washington justifies anything it does by saying it is necessary for homeland security, Latin Americans have a hard time taking seriously its expres- sions of concern for human rights in Cuba. The purpose of our Cuba policy, however, is not just to make fruitless gestures against Castro. Those actions take place shortly before our elections because their purpose is to keep the exiles in Miami faithfully voting Republican. The policy has accomplished nothing else except limiting our under- standing of what is happening on the island. That leaves Washington clueless about what might occur, and unpre- pared to influence the outcome, when biology finally brings the Castro era to an end. Breakthroughs Unlikely As for Africa, the continent was never on Bush’s radar screen because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic. About the only time any of Bush’s core con- stituencies paid attention to the region was when the Christian right correctly saw the civil war in Sudan as an attack on Christians in the south by Muslims in the north. To give the appearance of responding to that concern, a F O C U S 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 Bush was unintentionally on the mark when he said, “This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.”