Flunking Foreign Affairs

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Today's multiple choice quiz: George Bush is president because (1) some chads hung in Florida, (2) Al Gore stopped wearing earth tones or (3) Andy Hiller asked the wrong questions. The answer, I now feel certain, is (3). Hiller was the journalist who asked Bush during the campaign to name the leaders of Pakistan, Chechnya, Taiwan and India. Bush flunked and, on account of that, went on to win the presidency.

Why, you ask? Because the leaders in question were obscure and it was somewhat understandable that Bush could not name them. Had Hiller asked, instead, about France, Germany, Canada and China, Bush might have whiffed on them, too, and that would have been a different matter. Hiller not only held Bush to an unrealistically high standard, he inoculated him against further suggestions of intellectual insufficiency. The presidency was his.

Now we are beginning to see that Hiller was on to something. More and more the administration appears inept at foreign policy. Recently, for instance, it failed to instantly condemn the Venezuelan coup, somehow forgetting that the United States favors democratically elected governments, especially in this hemisphere. Someone should have looked it up.

It is the Middle East, though, where the administration has really floundered. Most spectacularly, Bush demanded that the headstrong leader of a sovereign state, Ariel Sharon, reverse policy "without delay." Sharon did nothing of the sort because, in effect, he felt he could do nothing of the sort. Just as a lawyer should not ask a witness a question to which he does not already know the answer, the president should not publicly demand that an ally do something it is determined not to do. These things, like squabbles between parents, are best settled behind closed doors -- in the sort of close-work diplomacy that Bush, for some reason, finds grossly Clintonesque.

In a policy sense, Bush seemed unhinged by what was happening on the West Bank. In a single day, the United States approved a U.N. resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal while, a bit later, Bush suggested that what the Israelis were doing was just fine with him. The United States had one foreign policy in the morning, another by afternoon -- and yet another reversal still to come.

The administration had lost its mooring -- an excessively exuberant moral clarity. The Israeli-Palestinian war was something of a moral muddle. Yes, Yasser Arafat is a terrorist by definition, but he is also the leader of the Palestinians and, to them and much of the world, a freedom fighter. Yes, Israel is a democracy fighting to keep its children safe from suicide bombers, but it is also an occupation power, insistent on intensifying its occupation of the West Bank with even more settlements.

The events of Sept. 11 were both awful and exhilarating. Once again, as in the Cold War, the United States was pitted against inarguable evil. Policy announced itself: Get al Qaeda. Get the Taliban. Fight terrorism. Only the most muddled thinker could find moral ambiguity in that situation. The fight against terrorism was, as Bush said it the first time, a true crusade.

But that template cannot be imposed on the rest of the world. This is what some of us were suggesting after Bush made his "axis of evil" speech. It was a rhetorical thumper, but intellectually hollow -- an homage to Ronald Reagan and to the good old days of the Cold War. The president cannot say in today's world that the United States must never talk with terrorists. Had Dick Cheney deigned to speak to Arafat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak might now be talking to Colin Powell. Talk is one thing. Concessions are something else.

In the presidential campaign, Bush denounced the Russians for the war they were waging in Chechnya. Now, though, the Chechens appear to have gone from freedom fighters to terrorists. When it comes to pure evil, it's hard to do better than Slobodan Milosevic. Yet the United States dealt with him at Dayton to end the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Andy Hiller's "Final Jeopardy" questions gave Bush cover. We all presumed that somewhere between the esoteric and the commonplace is where you would find George Bush. But it is clear that, shorn of moral absolutes, this president is at sea. He has delegated too much to the wrong people and not enough to the right people -- non-ideologues like Colin Powell. The result suggests a Hiller-like question that, for sure, George Bush could not answer:

What's our foreign policy?