The Bush Revolution is Over

Relationships between father and son have always been complicated, especially when the parental figure threatens to outshine his offspring. Sometimes the child’s anxiety to maintain a right to his own identity can drive him to strange extremes. You don’t need an accelerated course in psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires to notice the profound personality differences between Bush Senior and George W. Bush. The former was a pragmatist, a realist, who both negotiated with communist China and looked for a convenient alliance with his old enemy, Syria. He assumed that the world is like it is and not as we would like it to be. His son, however, set out to change the world accompanied by a group of neocons–some of them neo-Trotskists–that maintained a blind faith in the ability of the United States to mold reality and take on the world with its leadership. The revolution of George W. Bush has ended as all revolutions end: with lots of noise, defeat, and the gritting of teeth. And now the time has arrived for the pragmatic realism of Bush Senior.

In Europe, where we have really learned our lesson about revolutions, the fall of George W. Bush is celebrated with the same relief that we felt after the exile of the Jacobin Napoleon in Santa Elena. However, this will not be the end of the story, much less the end of our problems. Realism in politics almost always goes hand in hand with cynicism, and in the new era one can already guess who will get invitations to the party of neorealism: negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where we can forget about our dreams of redemption; handing over to Iraq the pro-Iranian Shiites they would intend to thwart with the support of the Sunni resistance, combined largely with the old followers of Saddam; and an invitation to the Iranian Ayatollahs to get involved in a global negotiation for the stability of the area… among other things that are hard to swallow. The difference is in that, unlike the unilateral revolution of George W. Bush, there’s nothing the followers of pragmatism in the United States like more than the company of the old and elusive Europe to celebrate these parties of such unpredictable guests.