A Truman for our times

By Edward Luttwak
Prospect, August 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

That George W. Bush's foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted.

In March 1952, most Americans could agree that President Harry S. Truman's foreign policy had been a catastrophic failure. In Korea his indecision had invited aggression, and then his incompetence cost the lives of some 54,000 Americans and millions of Korean civilians. Right-wingers reviled Truman for having lost China to communism. Abroad, many people believed that Truman was guilty of having started the cold war by trying to intimidate the Soviets.

Harry Truman came to be viewed as a great president, especially for his foreign policy. The Korean war is half forgotten, while everyone now knows that Truman's strategy of containment was successful and finally ended with the almost peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire.

For Bush to be recognized as a great president, the Iraq war must be recognized as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy. The ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush. Once Bush's victory is recognized, the errors of Iraq will be forgiven.

Until 9/11, Islamic militants enjoyed much public support across most of the Muslim world. From Morocco to Indonesia, governments appeased militants at home while encouraging them to focus their violent activities abroad. The Saudis financed extremist schools in many countries, including the U.S. and Britain, and had thousands of militant preachers on the payroll. The UAE rulers who now talk only of their airlines and banks are reliably reported to have handed over sackfuls of cash to Osama in person.

All this came to an abrupt end after 9/11. Sophisticates everywhere ridiculed the uncompromising Bush stance, but it was swiftly successful. Governments across the Muslim world quickly changed their conduct. The Saudis began to admit responsibility for having spread extremism through the thousands of schools and academies they financed at home and abroad. The Saudi king has convened an inter-faith conference of Muslims, Christians and Jews.

In different ways, other governments in Muslim countries also took their stand with Bush and the U.S. against the jihadists. But it was in Pakistan that Bush forced the most dramatic reversal of policy. President Musharraf was given a stark choice: stand with the U.S. to destroy the Taliban or be destroyed. Musharraf made the right choice.

Yet people casually remark that Bush's war on terror has been a total failure. The destruction of the twin towers inspired thousands of young Muslims to go down to the local Islamist prayer hall to offer their services to jihadists. It was quite enough to trigger many more attacks. Instead, the global jihadi mobilisation was stopped before it could gain any momentum by all that Bush set in motion: the destruction of al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan, the killing or capture of most of its operatives, and the conversion of Muslim governments from the support of jihad to its repression.

Jihadism has been largely confined to Iraq and the border zones of Pakistan, where guns are fashion statements and jihad the latest excuse for millennial violence. By contrast, since 9/11, attacks against western targets have been few, with not a single attack in the U.S. and just a handful in Europe. It would not have been so if a less determined president had been in the White House.

Bush's detractors must also contend with another great success: denuclearization. It started with Libya, which in 2003 surrendered all the equipment it had bought to make nuclear weapons. Then there is Syria, which lost its secret proto-nuclear reactor to a strike by the Israeli air force last September. The demolition of North Korea's nuclear programme has finally started. And most recently, the direct engagement of the U.S. with Iran's nuclear program has started. As usual, European diplomacy failed completely.

Often connected to the underestimation of George W. Bush as a foreign policy president (his fiscal policy is another matter), the new conventional wisdom is also wrong about the future of the U.S. itself. The economies of China and now India have been growing rapidly ever since their governments gave up self-destructive policies, and Brazil and many smaller countries from Israel to Singapore are doing the same. This has diminished the relative wealth of the U.S. and Europe, while at the same time greatly enriching them.

China has been the ally of the U.S. over decades. India and the U.S. have been slowly converging for two decades. But what is true of the new industrializing states is not true of the parasitic oil-bubble countries, from Russia to Saudi Arabia to Iran to Venezuela. Their enrichment really is our loss. Unlike China or India, the oil-bubble countries produce neither goods nor services. Thus their imports are unrequited transfers from oil consumers everywhere. If China, India, Brazil and the rest of the hard-working world were like oil-bubble countries, the future of U.S. power would indeed be in doubt.

The only interesting question is whether America will be forced to confront its national problems. There are strong signs that a transformational boom is taking off in the energy sector. This is not because Americans are suddenly fearful of global warming but because the virtue of fossil fuels was their cheapness, and they are not cheap any more.

So the commentators have got the two big questions about the U.S. place in the world completely back to front. They believe that Bush has failed in the very field where he has been most successful, and that China adds to American problems when the opposite is true.

In any case, none of the commentators can discern any evidence that the spirit of discovery and invention that has made the U.S. and the rest of the west so powerful is being relinquished. If anything, the U.S. seems set to remain the chief source of western innovation.
 

AR  A serious argument worth taking seriously. Bush's robust and simplistic conservatism is just the right outlook to find a resonance in the Islamic world and roll back the tide of "evil-doers."