Abstract
In its first months in office, the new bush administration has begun providing clues about its national security policies. While only hints, they portend decisions that won't be formally adopted until the administration completes a series of program reviews on missile defense, nuclear reductions, military spending, and foreign policy issues, and completes the filling of sub-cabinet positions.
The early indications are troubling:
• President George W. Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative, but his first appointments and early statements suggest a hard-right tilt on both national security and domestic issues comparable to the early days of the Reagan administration.
• Although the new appointees give lip service to a new era, they enunciate views that hark back to the days of the Cold War.
• These hardliners relish confrontation rather than cooperation with countries like Russia, China, and North Korea.
• The competition among four powerful decision-makers—Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice—has led to confusion and policy reversals.
• The administration seems willing to move quickly to overturn environmental and labor regulations. But aside from strident rhetoric, it is proceeding more cautiously when it comes to key decisions on national missile defense, possible nuclear reductions, and major weapons programs.
Ronald Reagan came into office with a hardline view of what he called “the Evil Empire.” Twenty years and one Cold War later, President Bush is following the same script. The early hallmarks of the new administration are hardline appointees and hardline rhetoric. Many appointees are movement conservatives who have spent decades opposing arms control. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld heads the list. His department includes ardent hawks like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolf-owitz, as well as choices for the top policy positions in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, Peter Rodman, and Stephen Cambone. The top State Department arms control appointee is John Bolton, nominated to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Bolton is a man with whom, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms has said, “I would want to stand at Armageddon.” He is joined by Otto Reich, active in Reagan's anti-Sandinista efforts in the 1980s, who will head the State Department's Latin American operation.
Teddy Roosevelt said the United States should speak softly and carry a big stick. But the Bush team speaks loudly. Some of its most tart remarks have been directed at Russia, now treated as a middling power no longer worthy of a great deal of attention.
President Bush, according to a March 15 Reuters report, contended that while Russia is no longer an enemy, “They may be a threat.” Rumsfeld, publicly challenging Russian arms sales to Iran, infuriated the Russians by saying in a February 14 interview on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that: “Russia is an active proliferator; they are part of the problem.”
With megaphone diplomacy the norm, Colin Powell told a congressional hearing on March 14, “In some ways, the approach to Russia, it seems to me, shouldn't be terribly different than the very realistic approach we had to the old Soviet Union in the late 1980s.”
Wolfowitz won the prize as the most acerbic when, in an interview published in the Sunday Telegraph on March 18, he said of Russia: “These people seem to be willing to sell anything to anyone for money. It recalls Lenin's phrase that the capitalists will sell the very rope from which we will hang them.”
The rhetoric has been followed by a series of decisions calculated to alienate Russia. Not content with the usual wrist slap after an FBI mole was discovered, on March 21 the administration flamboyantly ordered 50 Russians to leave the country.
In one of its first policy decisions, the administration decided to cut the proposed budget for Energy Department programs that help Russia dismantle its nuclear weapons complex and safeguard its nuclear weapons from $1.2 billion to $800 million. During the campaign, Bush had promised to increase the budget for these programs. The flip-flop came as a report released in January by a panel headed by former Sen. Howard Baker, a Republican, and Democratic lawyer Lloyd Cutler called for a dramatic increase in the program to about $3 billion a year.
In smaller ways, too, the administration has irritated Moscow: It rebuffed suggestions for an early summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin, authorized a meeting of State Department officials with the foreign minister of the separatist Chechen leadership, and opposed additional economic aid to Russia by international lending institutions.
Russia was the most frequent target, but Chena also got rough treatment. The Clinton administration viewed China as a strategic partner, and emphasized expanded trade rather than disagreements over Taiwan. But key Bush officials consider China the predominant threat to American interests. The administration has focused on China's human rights violations, trumpeted a high-level Chinese military defection during a March visit to the United States by Deputy Prime Minister Qian Qichen, and expressed alarm about China's announced 17.7 percent increase in its military budget (still less than one-sixth that of the United States).
Powell has rejected the Clinton administration's characterization of China as a “strategic partner.” He told a January 17 confirmation hearing: “China is a competitor and a potential regional rival.” Rumsfeld's policy reviews are expected to reorient U.S. defense from Europe and Russia toward Asia and China.
The clearest break from the Clinton policy of searching for agreements abroad—and the most dramatic evidence of policy confusion—came during the March 7 visit of South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung to Washington. Before he left office, President Clinton was tantalizingly close to an agreement with North Korea to terminate Pyongyang's ballistic missile program.
On March 6, Powell suggested that the administration would “pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off” with negotiations with North Korea. The next day, standing beside President Kim, Bush embarrassed his guest and the secretary of state by suggesting that the negotiations would not resume any time soon, throwing cold water on the South's policy of engagement with the North.
There were other signs of disarray in the administration's top ranks. Shortly after taking office, Rumsfeld suggested that an early increase in Pentagon spending was in the offing. However, within days the White House forced Rumsfeld to reverse course by announcing that the administration would not provide an early boost to Pentagon funding—although the money could flow once the Pentagon completes its policy reviews.
The administration also appeared confused over policy toward Iraq. Powell told a congressional hearing that a goal of the administration was to return U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein in check. However, Vice President Cheney, according to the March 9 Washington Times, told a lunch meeting of that newspaper's editors and reporters, “I don't think we want to hinge our policy just to the questions of whether or not inspectors go back in there.”
For all its strident policy pronouncements and flip-flops, there is mounting evidence that the administration may be willing to use hard-headed realism when making decisions about major weapons programs. On February 14, Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran pressed the administration for an early decision on construction of a radar site on Shemya Island in Alaska as the first step toward national missile defense deployment. Instead, there were hints in a March 16 Wall Street journal story that construction would be postponed to permit time to pick new technologies and consult with allies.
There were further indications that the Pentagon's search for a new and “layered” deployment scheme based on land, at sea, and in space might lead to more delays in deployment—perhaps to the next decade. On March 17, the National journal reported that Rumsfeld is considering some 17 competing proposals.
There were also leaks that Rumsfeld had come down on the side of those advocating transforming the American military to a lighter, more mobile force. The March 23 Washington Post suggested that the administration would build no more large aircraft carriers, abandon the policy of preparing for two simultaneous major conflicts, cut back on the number of the air force's prized F-22s, and spend more on unmanned aircraft.
To this point, speculation about the direction of the Bush II national security policy remains exactly that— speculation. After nearly three months in office, only about a fourth of top-level positions have been filled. It will be many more months before the administration divulges major segments of its national security policy.
But one thing is clear: Bush officials who spent eight years or more out of power carping about “weak” Clinton policies are determined to demonstrate toughness. As an unnamed Bush foreign policy adviser told the New York Daily News on March 23: “The Clinton people got intoxicated with the idea of cooperation. Those days are over. It's time for us to cooperate when we can but to put our strategic interests first. No more romance.”