George Bush's Conversion

George Bush’s Neoconservative friends are furious. Their champion seems to have allowed himself to be converted to diplomatic realism. The cause of their discontent is Undersecretary of State William Burns’ participation last week in a discussion of the nuclear question with an Iranian negotiator. The Weekly Standard, which is their favorite vehicle for expression, recalls numerous peremptory remarks by the President himself and by his collaborators, expressing hostility to any negotiation whatsoever, so long as Tehran doesn’t suspend its uranium enrichment program. Mr. Bush, then, did not keep his word. And Neoconservatives worry that it may become a pattern. A few months ago, he set drastic conditions for negotiation with North Korea, also concerning the nuclear question, and he would have abandoned them without any real concessions.

The few adherents that this group, quickly losing steam in Washington, still has in the Department of State would share the opinion of the Weekly Standard, if one is to take the word of an anonymous high official cited in the periodical: it’s no longer preemptive war, but “preemptive capitulation.” Has George Bush, a born-again Christian, been converted again? This is, in effect, the question raised by the presence of William Burns in Geneva with the Iranian representative. The answer isn’t clear.

Mr. Bush began foreign policy in the “realist” camp, which criticized his predecessor, Democrat Bill Clinton, for having thrown the United States into rash military operations, notably missions aiming to impose peace in the Balkans. “The marines were not founded to help schoolchildren cross the street,” Condoleezza Rice remarked in 2000, when she, along with a few others, was placed around the Republican candidate to teach him the basics of foreign policy. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 provoked the President’s conversion to the neoconservative theories. George Bush could say, like former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when asked about what determined his politics, “events, boys, events.”

Ms. Rice, who later became head of the National Security Council and then Secretary of State, is considered by his detractors to be the principal cause of the President’s turn toward “realism,” if, in fact, such a reversal occurred. During the Presidency of Bush, Sr., she was of the school of Brent Scowcroft, a friend of Henry Kissinger’s, known for his allergy to the international romanticism of the self-styled promoters of democracy.

George Bush’s new conversion could last, however. Given that the evident absence of goodwill on the part of the Iranians at the last round of talks wouldn’t have incited the Occidentals, the Russians, or perhaps even the Chinese to abandon the path of sanctions against Tehran.

It could be asked, for that matter, whether, in shifting his principles, the American President sought to emphasize the naiveté of the partisans of a diplomatic approach to the Iranian problem. Having made this demonstration, he would, then, be free to try other means, without being criticized for not having tried every possible peaceful route. Mr. Bush would doubtless prefer not to pass on to his successor the Iranian question in its current state. But nothing indicates by what means he intends to solve it.