My Life and Times

November 21, 2004
Hawk Sightings Could Be PrematureBy DAVID E. SANGER
ANTIAGO, Chile — Four years ago, the world thought it knew what kind of foreign policy George W. Bush would pursue. He had arrived in the Oval Office talking of a more "humble'' America that didn't tell countries how to conduct themselves inside their borders. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was viewed as a realist rather than an ideologue; she made a compelling case that the United States could not afford to tie up its military in nation-building efforts because that would "degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do.''
"We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten," she declared at the time, when few were thinking of her as a future secretary of state.
A lot has happened since, not least a terror attack on American soil that profoundly changed the President's world view, and with it Ms. Rice's. But just as it proved unwise to draw a straight line then between what the president-elect was saying and how he would act, it may be equally risky to race to the certainty - as many in Washington did last week - that a second Bush administration, unrestrained by the caution of Colin Powell, will lead the United States into an unending series of confrontations with the world, starting with bellicose approaches to controlling the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.
It could turn out that way, for sure. But it has been quite a while since the words "Axis of Evil'' sprang from the president's lips. And during the election campaign, it was clear from the president's words and actions that the limits on American power had begun to sink in on this White House.
Instead, presidential advisers have been talking of repairing ties and acting within alliances when they can - a process for which an early test arrived this weekend, when the re-elected president arrived in the shadow of the Andes for the annual summit of Pacific Rim leaders. Here he will be setting the agenda for the next four years with the likes of Hu Jintao of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Junichiro Koizumi of Japan and Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea.
Gone from the President's pre-summit pronouncements was the "with us or against us" language that marked previous such meetings. And when the subject turned to Iran and North Korea - countries with weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein could only have dreamed about - there was no mention of the kinds of deadlines he set two years ago for disarming Iraq.
Some in the administration suspect that this is a pose, and point out that Mr. Powell was already talking last week of a worrisome (but barely understood) effort by Iran to develop small nuclear warheads for its missile fleet. If America can persuade the world that Iran and North Korea pose an imminent threat - a much harder task after Iraq - the hawks may have their day, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.
But that is still a minority view in the administration. The prevailing view focuses not on the dangers, but on the limited options for doing anything about them. In other words, Iraq has made it harder to be hawkish in this White House, not because desires to act have changed, but because it has tied down American combat troops and magnified the need to juggle scarce military resources.
With roughly 130,000 troops stationed in Iraq for a while - and hundreds of thousands more supplying them, training to replace them, or just coming off duty there - Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice lack the kind of flexibility to deal with crises around the world that they had four years ago. What's more, the president has now committed himself to some of the largest nation-building efforts since the Marshall Plan, from Iraq to Afghanistan and perhaps, if his vision is realized, elsewhere in the Middle East.
The result is that "we may have maxed out on hawkishness for a while,'' said Daniel Benjamin, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton and was deeply involved in the first, unsuccessful, efforts to curb Al Qaeda in the 1990's. There will be "many opportunities to sound hawkish'' on North Korea and Iran, said Mr. Benjamin, but Mr. Bush has limited options in both places. While he remains fundamentally at odds with Mr. Roh, who wants a more conciliatory approach that would allow more countries to be involved in the bargaining with North Korea, Pentagon planners acknowledge that America has good reason to avoid any flare-up with North Korea. That would almost certainly require reinforcing the American presence in Asia, even as it is being reduced to bolster the effort to pacify Iraq.
Ivo H. Daalder, a Brookings Institution scholar who co-wrote one of the first books examining the revolution in foreign policy that Mr. Bush has wrought, notes that Iran "can make our life terribly miserable in Iraq'' by further fueling the insurgency there. Mr. Daalder does not believe that Mr. Bush will suddenly start embracing the United Nations or the International Atomic Energy Agency as partners in dealing with North Korea and Iran; the Bush White House views both with disdain.
"Instead, we may just do less in a second term, and learn to live with our limits,'' Mr. Daalder said, even if that means silently tolerating a nuclear capability that Mr. Bush has said would be unacceptable in either North Korea or Iran. Some administration officials dispute that view, saying that Vice President Cheney would not stand for such an outcome. They expect him to press for anything short of military invasion: harsh economic squeezes, even covert attempts to bring about a change of government.
In fact, the most important unanswered question about the second term may well be what power dynamic will emerge among Mr. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice.
Mr. Cheney's office was already moving last week to put his disciples into key second-tier jobs. Mr. Rumsfeld, White House insiders said, was maneuvering to hold on to his job as defense secretary as long as possible. And Ms. Rice's views as national security adviser have been somewhat inscrutable. In that job she swung from her initial role as Mr. Bush's tutor in the ways of the world to a new one, as the woman who tried to read Mr. Bush's post-Sept. 11 instincts and shape them into a new national strategy.
Some people close to Ms. Rice think she is being sent to the State Department to make sure the diplomatic corps enables a more muscular American approach, rather than apologizes for it. "The reality is that she sided more often with Cheney and Rummy than she did with Powell,'' said an associate who witnessed many of the administration's internal debates. Ms. Rice, the friend said, has been heard expressing "complaints that State is not with the program.''
But she has also been talking about a mission of repairing breached relationships, and of delving into the opportunities in the Middle East that were created by the death of Yasir Arafat. The first goal could require striking a more flexible tone with the Europeans and the South Koreans; the second might involve putting pressure on Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, in a way that this administration never has. Both would require managing Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, a task that her critics believe she has failed at, despite her closeness to the president.
The first test may come in her selection of a deputy. Mr. Cheney's wing is pressing for someone like John R. Bolton, an acolyte of the vice president who runs the State Department's proliferation office. A very different choice would be someone like Arnold Kanter, a former State Department official who now works with Brent Scowcroft, who was the first President Bush's national security adviser. Mr. Scowcroft was Ms. Rice's mentor until the two differed over the Iraq invasion. Choosing Mr. Kanter to run the daily operations of the State Department could signal a shift toward something more like the first President Bush's approach to the world.
Another litmus test may be Ms. Rice's handling of Russia, the country she has spent a lifetime studying. When she arrived at the White House, she viewed Mr. Putin as a K.G.B. throwback to the age of Soviet hard-liners. Her public description of Mr. Putin became much more charitable after the President declared that he had looked into the Russian's eyes and seen his soul, and after Russia cooperated in allowing American military forces to operate against the Taliban from formerly Soviet territory. Now she appears to be swinging back toward her original view, especially after reading (in the original Russian) Mr. Putin's hard-line speech following the terror attack on a Russian school, an event he is using to try to consolidate more power in the Kremlin.
"The place you really see the change from realism to ideology is in the way she talks about converting the Mideast to democracies,'' said one longtime associate. "The Condi that came to Washington would have raised an eyebrow and said 'Good luck.' Now she sounds a lot more idealistic, even ideological, than we've heard before.''
Indeed, Ms. Rice has been known to defend her boss's own bent toward idealistic and assertive American missions; she told French colleagues not long ago that without a good dose of American idealism, the United States might not have worked so hard to liberate Normandy. The question now is what happens when that brand of idealism comes up against the realities of managing the world, at a moment when the latest American experiment in using force to transform a nation - in Iraq - is still well short of the outcome the Bush administration envisioned two years ago.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top