Embarrassed White House backpedals on Bush speech.
The world was rocked by President Bush’s inaugural address. Fox News reports: (*)
President Bush’s inauguration day speech was a 180-degree turnaround from the pre-2000 election campaign in which he said he didn’t believe it was the United States’ role to get involved in nation building.
Already, however, the mature thinkers in the Bush Administration are trying to overrule their out-of-control boss. The Washington Post reports: (†)
White House officials said yesterday that President Bush’s soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.
So the question is posed: is the speech empty rhetoric or does it represent a grand policy shift?
Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with countries such as Russia, China, Egypt and Pakistan, allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.
In his inaugural address Thursday at the Capitol, President Bush promised his second-term goal would be to spread freedom and democracy and end “tyranny in the world.” Some saw his words as changing U.S. foreign policy.
Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president’s deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny. . . .
But it has alarmed some critics, who say it suggests a major and potentially mistaken expansion of U.S. foreign policy goals or merely empty rhetoric. They have asked whether the speech’s soaring language has any practical application as the president goes about the gritty work of day-to-day diplomacy, and, if it does not, what meaning does it have?
The Post’s report goes on to mention that writers outside the White House had influence on the speech. Among them were William Kristol, Natan Sharansky, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, and John Lewis Gaddis. Not shockingly, we haven’t heard a peep of criticism of Bush’s speech from any of them.
What practical implications does the speech have, indeed? It must have either major implications or none at all. The words “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” have no nuance. That bit of blather told to the papers about the nuances of Bush’s speech is nothing more than deceit.
Of course, the real story is that Bush presented an impossible adolescent fantasy in the speech. The Bush Administration will nevertheless seek to exploit its empty rhetoric as it tries to convince certain parties of the benevolence of the Administration’s intentions. That will be especially useful as those countries with economic ties to the US, like China and Saudi Arabia, get a free pass from Bush’s “end tyranny now” campaign, while countries like Belarus feel the chill.
This bit of news may also conceal a power struggle going on within the White House. On the one hand are those on the side of realpolitik. On the other side are the idealists. With this announcement, the realist side has made a major display of influence, indicating they are the real power behind the throne.
Update: The New York Times has the same story. (‡)