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Posted on 09/29/2001 9:53:48 AM PDT by quimby

Under George W. Bush, a fundamental change has already taken place in American foreign policy: The foreign world is again, well, foreign. Gone is the Clintonian emotional expansiveness that took in friend and foe alike, displaying a false identification with places near and far. That neurosis about acceptance, that compulsive need for seduction, drove Bill Clinton and took him everywhere Air Force One could land. There is nothing of this in Bush. The man's ease with himself is, in part, an ease with home and country and familiar verities.

No, it is not too early to make this kind of call. Those who predict that, with time, President Bush will take to the road and succumb to foreign temptation are wrong. A different wind blows, with a different judgment about the world beyond the water's edge. Consider this passage in the president's big speech in early May calling for national missile defense: "Like Saddam Hussein, some of today's tyrants are gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. They hate democracy and freedom and individual liberty. Many care little for the lives of their own people." This kind of moral clarity harks back to Ronald Reagan: The world outside is a big place, and its values are not always America's. There are things that the presidential Rolodex cannot fix--something Bush senior also did not understand. There are matters that cannot be wished away on a presidential visit to Beijing or to the Gaza Strip.

It was odd, that Clintonian empathy for the foreign world--and false. It sprang from many sources and had many justifications. Clinton was "the globalization president," his admirers never wearied of reminding us. The world outside was made of potential consumers, Internet users, and, of course, campaign donors. Men and women in a chat room could not be dangerous. Everywhere from Beijing to Ramallah, Clinton told us, the atavisms were being banished. A new age of commerce, a Pax Kapital, was dawning; the man saw himself as an evangelist of that global age. Clinton was sure that nations that trade with each other would renounce war with each other; he accepted that reading of history at face value. It was cut to his own needs and temperament, of a piece with the utopianism that seized the 1990s--the new economy dispensing with the laws of profit and valuation, the new politics consigning history's furies to the past, and, of course, the confessionalism that was the principal cultural product of the era.

Clinton staked a great deal on the Internet, offering it as proof that borders had fallen and enmities had dissipated. "In the new century," he said, "liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem." China's masters would be tempted to control this new technology, but they were destined to fail. "Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall," he proclaimed. The false sense of security and the refusal to accept "otherness" and cultural difference deluded and misled Clinton. The Palestine National Council in Gaza, before which he appeared and offered the closest thing to an American Balfour Declaration for a Palestinian state, was, in Clinton's fantasy, a Palestinian equivalent of the U.S. Congress. He knew nothing of the cast of characters assembled before him. But he had his salesman's confidence, a sublime confidence that history would break his way.

As his troubles and sexual scandals mounted at home, Clinton grew more desperate for foreign acceptance. He knew the foreign world was more forgiving of such foibles. He journeyed to foreign lands often, particularly toward the end of his presidency. Clinton himself told us that he pursued a deal at Wye River between Yasir Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu in late 1998 as a form of penance for the Lewinsky affair: foreign policy as psychobiography. Bush, by contrast, does not need to "bond" with Arafat or to seek validation from peoples beyond. To the extent a man's character can be discerned, Bush seems blissfully free of the urge to fake an intimacy with strangers. He will not seek personal deliverance through quick fixes for age-old troubles.

Which is good, because the Clintonian vision has been debunked. China hasn't clicked its way out of authoritarianism or cast its political ambitions aside. Chinese nationalism has replaced communism among the young. And the crowds in Gaza and Ramallah have waged nothing short of an insurrection against everything Clinton thought they adhered to. Clinton never really knew Arafat or his ways. It was hubris to think he did--his peculiarly parochial tendency to step into a foreign world and think its riddles and mysteries would yield to a stranger's touch. It was the Davos fix--the pop internationalism bred at the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum. From the "commanding heights" of Davos, Clinton and the crowd dispensed with the messiness of the world. It is unlikely that the Davos types will soon see Bush in their midst. The Davos happiness is not his own, nor is the Davos talk about a "borderless" world.

Don't expect Bush to journey to Gaza anytime soon either. He will, in the main, stay away from the Israeli-Palestinian cauldron. Defying those who thought he would be his father's heir, he appears to have an intuitive understanding of Israelis' disappointment with Arafat, a fundamental recognition of the simple, unadorned truth that Israel cannot negotiate against the background of a deadly insurrection waged by the Palestinian National Authority. Clinton's way was to presume that he offered Israel "tough love" and was thus entitled to demand all sorts of sacrifices from Israel's leaders. Bush entertains no such presumption. There is no redemptionism in him, no expectation that the historical and moral lines of this tenacious conflict can be blurred or that an American president can offer his own "empathy" as some antidote to trouble.

Clinton was the perfect salesman--seeing what he wanted to see, missing so much, misreading so much. Around him gathered a national security team of trade lawyers and sunny optimists sure of the ascendancy of American values. Instinctively, Bush knows better. In a peculiar way, his mix of "humility" abroad and his wary uneasiness about challenges to American security are true to our age. The 1990s were a fool's paradise, a lucky run lived in the shadow of the twin triumphs of the cold war and the Gulf war. We have exhausted these victories, and there has been no technological deliverance from the passions of history. In his very Americanism, and in his acceptance of the fact that China and Russia are great potential rivals to American primacy, Bush has already paid the foreign world the compliment it deserves: the recognition that there are nemeses of America's power and purposes out there--and that alien lands breed their own truths.

FOUAD AJAMI is a contributing editor at TNR.

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