The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [106]
Through the Clinton years, American power became more apparent, Washington became more assertive, and foreign governments became more resistant. Some of Clinton’s economic advisers, like Mickey Cantor and Lawrence Summers, were accused of arrogance in their dealings with other countries. Diplomats like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke were disparaged in Europe for talking about America as, in Albright’s phrase, the “indispensable nation.” The French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine devised the term “hyperpower”—which he did not mean as a term of endearment—during the 1990s.3
But all these complaints were polite chatter compared with the hostility aroused by George W. Bush. For several years, the Bush administration practically boasted of its disdain for treaties, multilateral organizations, international public opinion, and anything that suggested a conciliatory approach to world politics. By Bush’s second term, when the failure of this confrontational approach was clear, the administration had started to change course on many fronts, from Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to North Korea. But the new policies were adopted belatedly, with considerable muttering and grumbling and with elements of the administration utterly unreconciled to the new strategy.
To understand the Bush administration’s foreign policy, it is not enough to focus on Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s “Jacksonian” impulses or Bush’s Texas background or the nefarious neoconservative conspiracy. The crucial enabling factor for the Bush policies was 9/11. For a decade prior to the attacks, the United States had been unchecked on the world stage. But several domestic constraints—money, Congress, public opinion—made it difficult for Washington to pursue a unilateral and combative foreign policy. Military interventions and foreign aid were both unpopular, as the public wanted the United States to retreat from the world after the rigors of the Cold War. The Balkan interventions, NATO expansion, aid to Russia, all required considerable effort from the Clinton administration, often pushing uphill, despite the fact that these were relatively small ventures that cost little in resources. But 9/11 changed all that. It broke the domestic constraints on American foreign policy. After that terrible attack, Bush had a united country and a largely sympathetic world. The Afghan War heightened the aura of American omnipotence, emboldening the most hard-line elements in the administration, who used that success as an argument for going to war with Iraq quickly and doing so in a particularly unilateral manner. The United States didn’t need the rest of the world or the old mechanisms of legitimacy and cooperation. It was the new global empire that would create a new reality—so the argument went. The formula to explain Bush’s foreign policy is simple:
Unipolarity + 9/11 + Afghanistan = Unilateralism + Iraq.*
It was not just the substance of American policy that changed in the unipolar era. So did the style, which became imperial and imperious. There is much communication with foreign leaders, but it’s a one-way street. Other governments are often simply informed of U.S. policy. Senior American officials live in their own bubbles, rarely having any genuine interaction with their overseas counterparts, let alone other foreigners. “When we meet with American officials, they talk and we listen—we rarely disagree or speak frankly because they simply can’t take it in. They simply repeat the