Analysis Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 14 2000 (IPS) — US foreign policy under President-elect George W. Bush is likely to be more unilateralist and more defined by traditional notions of “national interest” and power politics than that which has prevailed over the last eight years under President Bill Clinton.

While Bush, like his father who governed from 1989 to 1993, is expected to give ample lip-service to the importance of co-ordinating closely with US allies, especially in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, any suggestion that their views should be given as much weight as Washington’s would be dismissed out of hand by the president-elect and his closest advisers.

Bush’s team has already indicated, for example, that it has no patience at all for three major international initiatives which are strongly backed by Washington’s European allies and Japan: the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Rome Treaty to create an International Criminal Court (ICC), and the Kyoto Protocol that to fight global warming by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in industrialised countries.

He has also taken a tougher rhetorical stance on the United Nations, having pledged never to permit US troops to serve under UN command or to participate in any UN or other peacekeeping operation, even in the Ballkans, which does not serve “vital” national interests.

And his so-far unqualified commitment to building a national missile defence (NMD) over the furious objections of Russia and China has already provoked great concern in Europe and elsewhere about a revival of Cold War- like tensions and an arms race that could spread, domino-like, from one side of the Eurasian continent to the other.

“Mishandling this issue could have severe consequences across a wide range of concerns, including the nation’s military security and relations with the allies, Russia, and China,” a recent report by national-security experts at the Rand Corporation warned.

How much these campaign positions will be translated into actual policy remains to be seen, particularly in light of Bush’s defeat in the popular vote and the much-strengthened position of the Democrats in Congress. “It’s going to be the centre that governs in America now,” noted Bush’s one-time Republican rival, John McCain, in a television interview after the president-elect’s victory speech Wednesday night before the Texas legislature.

Bush’s explicit pledge during that speech to pursue a “bipartisan foreign policy” suggested that he may already be thinking of compromise on key issues. Meanwhile, the pressure from his corporate donors, almost all of which are multinational enterprises, is certain to temper his pandering to the right, especially if it could harm key commercial relationships, such as that with China.

Unlike Bush senior, George W. has never shown any particular interest in the world beyond US borders, and he will probably be the least well- travelled incoming president since Harry Truman, a haberdasher from Missouri, was elevated to the presidency after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945.

But there is no doubt that he will be surrounded by seasoned foreign-policy professionals, virtually all of whom served in mid- to top-level positions in his father’s administration.

Beginning with his running-mate, Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, who served as the former president’s defence secretary, the in-coming foreign policy team will be completely dominated by the veteran policymakers who oversaw the invasion of Panama in 1989, the Gulf War in 1991, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the unification of Germany.

“I think every senior-level nominee is being vetted by the Scowcroft Group,” one Bush veteran told IPS in a reference to the consulting firm of ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the former president’s National Security Adviser.

Ret. Gen. Colin Powell, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces during the Gulf War, is a virtual shoo-in as secretary of state, as is Condoleeza Rice, a top Soviet specialist under Scowcroft’s National Security Council, for the post of National Security Adviser. Both African-Americans, Powell and Rice will be virtually the only dash of colour in the national-security nomenklatura under the younger Bush.

“These appointees will be relentlessly white, relentlessly male, and relentlessly conventional in their foreign-policy ideas,” said one Clinton foreign-policy official this week. “They all made their reputations on Cold-War power politics, and they haven’t changed much in the eight years they’ve been out of power.”

In addition to Cheney, Powell and Rice, other likely top picks for national-security positions at the Pentagon, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) include Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, both senior Defence officials under Bush; and Richard Armacost, a former top State Department official who has presided over the ” Republicanisation” of the influential foreign-policy division of the non-partisan Brooking Institution during the Clinton administration.

Rep. Porter Goss, the hawkish chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and former (CIA) officer, is also considered a candidate for CIA director, while Robert Zoellick, a top foreign-policy aide to former Secretary of State James Baker, could be tapped for US Trade Representative where he can be expected to vigorously push the interests of Corporate America in its zeal for accelerated globalisation uninhibited by such Democratic concerns as worker rights or the environment.

Baker himself, who headed George W.’s successful efforts to seal his electoral victory in the courts, is reportedly interested in taking over the World Bank, traditionally a US preserve, if James Wolfensohn, now into his second term, might be persuaded to step down early.

Baker, a high-powered corporate lawyer who, as Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, was a major booster of structural adjustment in the Third World during the 1980s, has never been known for his sympathy for transparency, participation, equity, civil society, empowerment, or other concepts which Wolfensohn has tried to promote in the Bank.

Indeed, many of the newer, “softer” concepts about international relations which have come to the fore over the past eight years – particularly those often referred to by Republicans as “social work,” such as combating poverty or even fighting infectious diseases and democracy promotion, or “nation-building” – are notions which evoke bewilderment, if not scorn, among many of those who are now jockeying for top national-security posts under a George W. Bush administration.

“The best you can say about Mr. Bush is that he has thought about the world and decided that it’s still the 1980s,” wrote Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, during the campaign, “and therefore he plans to solve the problems of his father’s era with his father’s old advisers.”