James Mann: At the White House, What’s Old May Be New
[James Mann is an author in residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”]
THE new Obama foreign policy team is on the job. Its senior members have been confirmed, and many worked in government the last time the Democrats occupied the White House. So we have a rough idea where things are headed, right? Back to the ideas and approaches we saw in the Clinton administration ...
Not necessarily. That’s the sort of thing people were saying eight years ago, when George W. Bush’s top aides took office. At the time, nearly everyone got them wrong.
In January 2001, the common perception of the new Bush team was that it represented above all a reversion to the policies of previous Republican administrations. The new appointees were considered a bunch of “retreads.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and a wave of lower officials had served in the George H. W. Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was returning to a job he had held in the Ford administration.
And so the expectation was that their policies would represent a return to the pragmatic approaches epitomized by the elder Mr. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. There would be no more Clinton-era ambitions overseas of the sort that critics acidly called “foreign policy as social work.”
Why were these early readings of George W. Bush’s foreign policy team so far off the mark?
First, the whole notion of a team of “retreads” coming back into office glosses over the possibility of internal disagreements, both among personalities and over issues.
In the George H. W. Bush administration, Mr. Cheney and General Powell, as secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the Pentagon during the invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they had also come away from these events with very different notions of America’s role in the world.
The signs of discord were there before the Bush team took office. ...
Read entire article at NYT
THE new Obama foreign policy team is on the job. Its senior members have been confirmed, and many worked in government the last time the Democrats occupied the White House. So we have a rough idea where things are headed, right? Back to the ideas and approaches we saw in the Clinton administration ...
Not necessarily. That’s the sort of thing people were saying eight years ago, when George W. Bush’s top aides took office. At the time, nearly everyone got them wrong.
In January 2001, the common perception of the new Bush team was that it represented above all a reversion to the policies of previous Republican administrations. The new appointees were considered a bunch of “retreads.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and a wave of lower officials had served in the George H. W. Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was returning to a job he had held in the Ford administration.
And so the expectation was that their policies would represent a return to the pragmatic approaches epitomized by the elder Mr. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. There would be no more Clinton-era ambitions overseas of the sort that critics acidly called “foreign policy as social work.”
Why were these early readings of George W. Bush’s foreign policy team so far off the mark?
First, the whole notion of a team of “retreads” coming back into office glosses over the possibility of internal disagreements, both among personalities and over issues.
In the George H. W. Bush administration, Mr. Cheney and General Powell, as secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the Pentagon during the invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they had also come away from these events with very different notions of America’s role in the world.
The signs of discord were there before the Bush team took office. ...