Posted on 05/14/2002 10:21:13 PM PDT by kattracks
The Bush administration's new nuclear arms treaty with Russia is worth contemplating. It is, in its own way, a thing of beauty--a small thing that is actually quite large and that is wonderfully confounding to the way things are supposed to work. It is a mere three pages long. It was arrived at not through years of negotiating by teams of experts, but in a matter of months, chiefly on the strength of personal rapport between George W. Bush and Vladimir V. Putin. It is a victory for Bush--it cements American nuclear superiority, committing the United States to do with its nuclear arsenal only and precisely what already-decided doctrine called for, and this commitment is reversible. But it is also a victory for Putin, giving him a treaty he needed to show back home as fruits of friendship with America. It arrives only five months after Bush yanked America out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the usual experts said would wreck the arms limitation process. It is a far-sighted treaty--from an American president who had seemed to regard arms treaties as abominations and who had specifically rejected one in this matter.
This bit of paper is emblematic of an evolution that is arriving at definition. Piece by piece, in an urgent process of growth that began Sept. 11, Bush is forging a new--in context, radical--foreign policy. This is not so much a matter of doctrine as philosophy--a set of values, a worldview, to use two other terms Bush would reject as overly grand. It is largely stated through actions instead of words, and it is working to rapid and transformative effect.
Bush's philosophy rests on three deceptively simple tenets.
(BEG ITAL)(1) America first. Bush is certainly not an isolationist and he cannot even credibly be called a unilateralist, but in any consideration of choices he is highly focused on one question: What is good for the United States? The interests and sensibilities of other nations and other peoples are unapologetically of secondary concern. This kind of single-mindedness is harder to sustain, and more rare in a president, than you might think. It lends great clarity to decision-making and great strength to execution. The triumph (and it is, over all, clearly that) of the American campaign in Afghanistan rests entirely on this quality. American security demanded the destruction of al Qaeda and the Taliban, no matter what anyone said, no matter what the risk. That's that; the rest is commentary.
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