Asia Times: Welcome to Bush's Hobbesian world


	March 13, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

Welcome to Bush's Hobbesian world
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Less than two months after taking office, US President George W Bush last week pushed US foreign policy toward a new dimension, far removed from the sunny optimism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and much closer to the Hobbesian universe occupied by Richard Nixon.

The question now is whether he will continue in that direction, and, if so, whether he will drag the world with him.

The specific moment at which the transformation became clear was Wednesday's meeting between Bush and the first Asian head of state to visit the White House during his tenure, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, whose visionary efforts for reconciliation with North Korea earned him last year's Nobel Peace Prize. In what all parties called a "frank" exchange, Bush told Kim that he was in no hurry to resume talks with the North's Kim Jong-il on mothballing Pyongyang's missile program or on just about anything else that could hasten a final peace agreement.

The exchange marked not only a sharp rebuff to Kim. It also constituted an apparent repudiation of what was widely seen as one of president Bill Clinton's greatest foreign-policy successes, the gradual neutralizing of what has long been seen as one of the world's most militarized and dangerous regimes.

Before returning to Seoul, Kim felt obliged to make a public appeal for Bush to reconsider. "We must not lose this opportunity," he told a luncheon on Thursday. "Without progress between the US and North Korea, advances in South-North Korean relations will be difficult to achieve," he warned, suggesting that Pyongyang, in the absence of further engagement by Washington, may revert to its prior pattern of angry isolation and provocation.

But the potential implications of Bush's rebuff go beyond the Koreas. It will almost certainly strengthen those forces in China which have warned that the new president's determination to build a national missile defense (NMD), his clear desire to defend Taiwan, and his insistence that Beijing be treated as a "competitor" rather than as a "'strategic partner," as was espoused by Clinton, all mean an eventual confrontation with Washington for which China must prepare. Those same forces last week gained a major victory of their own when the Communist Party, citing "drastic changes" in the global security situation, announced a 17.5 percent in China's military budget.

Bush's rebuff also dealt a serious setback to Secretary of State Colin Powell who, in contrast to other senior Bush policy-makers, has argued strongly for continuity with Clinton's foreign policy in key areas and has shown a distinct lack of enthusiasm for NMD and other of the new administration pet projects. Just the day before the meeting, Powell assured reporters here that the Bush administration was prepared to start with North Korea where Clinton had left off by quickly clinching a deal on missiles as part of a broader strategy with Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing to further Pyongyang's regional integration.

Overruled by Bush, Powell, being a good soldier, quickly retreated. By the following day, he was denouncing Pyongyang in strong terms, calling it "a failed society" with a "despotic" and "broken" regime. But the evidence was clear: Powell had lost a critical battle in the struggle over foreign policy. And he had lost it to administration hard-liners, led by the redoubtable team of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. Those two, who first came to prominence under Nixon, have quickly emerged as the dominant influence on the new administration's national-security policy.

Indeed, this was not the first battle with hard-liners that Powell has waged and lost, only the most visible and embarrassing. During his confirmation hearings, for example, Powell suggested that Bush may be more flexible on NMD than his campaign indicated. On that point, he was flatly contradicted by Rumsfeld.

Similarly, during his trip to the Gulf and the Middle East, Powell argued that Washington was prepared to drop UN economic sanctions against Iraq in exchange for bolstering the sanctions regime banning military and dual-use imports. When assailed by hawks in Congress and the Pentagon for not promoting a serious effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein as well, Powell was again forced to back down.

Powell has even lost to the hawks on a number of personnel battles, beginning with his unsuccessful efforts to have his long-time friend Richard Armitage appointed as Rumsfeld's deputy. Since then, Powell has been forced to accept a number of appointees in senior State Department positions whose policy positions are very much at odds with his more-moderate views.

The struggle between the two camps is really one between two distinct world views. Although a career military man, Powell, like Clinton under whom he served for a brief period as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appears far more open than other members of the Bush national security team to the notion that no problem in a globalized world cannot be overcome by human reason, dialogue, and goodwill backed, only as a very last resort, by the threat or use of force. Thus, unlike his colleagues in the Bush administration, Powell supported the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and other multilateral disarmament efforts. It is he, virtually alone in the administration, who has talked at length about the importance of building multilateral coalitions to combat threats to peace and global problems, such as poverty and HIV/AIDS.

It is no surprise that Rumsfeld and Cheney, in particular, disdain this view. After all, they cut their political teeth under Nixon at a time when he was raging about the consequences of "the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America act[ing] like a pitiful, helpless giant". And they served in top positions when the US suffered its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, as well as other major setbacks in the Third World. In their view, Clinton's policy on North Korea amounted to appeasement, and the Chinese leadership is itself preparing for eventual confrontation with the United States anyway, in which case deployment of NMD was only prudent.

For them, like Nixon, the world appears to be much as Hobbes described it in the absence of a superpower, or "Leviathan" which can impose order: a "war of every man against every man" whose nature consists of a "perpetual and restless desire for power". In such a world, the US can depend only on itself to protect and promote its "national interest" - the mantra which Bush himself has always used to describe his foreign policy goals.

Given those assumptions, the logic of NMD designed to make the US invulnerable to external attack is entirely compelling, and the Central Intelligence Agency's warnings that NMD will set off a new arms race that will ripple across much of Eurasia from North Korea, China, and possibly Russia, to India, Pakistan and into the Gulf are not a major concern.

Indeed, as some analysts, including New York Times columnist Tom Friedman have already suggested, missile talks with North Korea had to be put on hold lest an agreement persuade the public that NMD was unnecessary.

(Inter Press Service)

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