George Bush’s New Conversion

The neoconservative friends of George Bush are furious. Their champion is rumored to have let himself be converted to diplomatic realism. The pretext of their wrath is the participation last week of Under-Secretary of State William Burns at the meeting with the Iranian negotiator on the nuclear issue. The Weekly Standard, which is their favorite vehicle of expression, had it easy recalling the numerous preemptory declarations of the president himself and his collaborators hostile to any negotiation as long as Teheran had not suspended its program of uranium enrichment. Bush then seems not to have kept his commitment. What worries neoconservatives is that the president is a recidivist. Several months ago, he posed drastic conditions to negotiations with North Korea, also regarding a nuclear issue, and he seems to have abandoned them without real consideration.

The few imitators that this group, seriously losing speed in Washington, still has in the State Department shared the opinion of the Weekly Standard, if one believes a high official cited by the weekly newspaper: this is not preventative war, but “preventative capitulation,” this anonymous diplomat is supposed to have said. Has George Bush, who presents himself as a born again Christian, undergone a new conversion? This in fact is the question that William Burns’ presence at Geneva with the Iranian representative poses. The answer is not clear.

Bush began in foreign policy in the camp of the “realists,” who reproached his predecessor, the Democrat Bill Clinton, of having launched the United States in ill-considered military operations. Notably the missions aimed at imposing peace in the Balkans. “The marines were not trained to help children in schools to cross the street,” said in 2000 Condoleezza Rice, who had been placed, with several others, close to the Republican candidate to teach him the basics of foreign policy. The terror attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought about the conversion of the president to the theses of the neoconservatives. As George Bush might say, like the old British prime minister Harold Macmillan when asked what determined his policy, “events, boys, events.”

Mrs. Rice, who then became the head of the National Security Council and then Secretary of State, is considered by her critics as the primary person responsible for the realist turn of the president, if there is a turn. During the term of Bush’s father, she was at the school of Bent Scowcroft, a close associate of Henry Kissinger, know for his allergy to the internationalist romanticism of self proclaimed promoters of democracy.

The new conversion of George Bush could however last for a long time. Especially since the evident absence of good will on the part of the Iranians, in the last round of talks, should not incite either the Westerners, the Russians, or maybe not even the Chinese to abandon the path of sanctions against Tehran.

One could on the other hand ask one’s self whether, in infringing upon his principles, the American president is not trying to underline the naivety of the supporters of a diplomatic approach to the Iranian problem. Having made this demonstration, he would have free reign to contemplate other strategies, without incurring the reproach of not having tried everything in the peaceful route. Mr. Bush would without a doubt like not to pass the Iranian question in its current state on to his successor. But nothing says by what means he intends to settle it.