President George H.W. Bush is out of the hospital. This is good news. Let’s hope that his health continues to improve.
President Bush’s recent return to the spotlight — even if because of illness — does provide an occasion to reassess his presidency. I’d like to focus on the elder Bush’s foreign policy for three reasons: first, foreign policy is my own area of expertise; second, it was, by all counts, the area that most interested the president himself; and his tenure in his office was marked by historic developments in the international arena.
(Disclosure: I worked in the State Department as a career foreign service officer during the Bush administration, though in a low-level capacity. I’ve met President Bush a couple times, all of them those fleeting occasions when a nobody is ushered into the presence of a somebody. Such occasions are one of the burdens of fame; Bush, I should note, famously endures this burden with grace.)
The foreign policy record of the George H.W. Bush administration is, on balance, first-rate. Most notably, Bush helped manage the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in ways that both advanced U.S. security and bolstered European stability. In retrospect, the peaceful reunification of Germany and relatively orderly dissolution of the Soviet empire may seem inevitable. But they most assuredly did not appear so at the time. President Bush’s efforts to advance German reunification through talks that included the two German governments and the traditional major powers helped assuage fears in London, Paris and Moscow. His studious refusal to wax triumphant over the collapse of the Soviet Union helped prevent a nationalist backlash in the Russian heartland. And his focus on ensuring that important arms control agreements remain in force despite turmoil in the former Soviet Union both enhanced stability in Eurasia and discouraged proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In the Middle East, the George H.W. Bush administration scored similar successes. Operation Desert Storm — which featured a coalition that included not just traditional NATO allies but Arab states such as Egypt and Syria — ejected Iraq from Kuwait at surprisingly modest fiscal and human cost to the United States. The Madrid Peace Conference may not have fulfilled its promise of initiating a process of normalization of relations between Arabs and Israelis. But it was nonetheless historic for creating the first face-to-face meetings between bitter adversaries.
Let me stipulate two things:
First, the administration of George H. W. Bush had its share of foreign policy failures. It was slow to react to the deteriorating security situation in the Balkans. It was caught unawares by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And the removal of Manuel Noriega as leader of Panama, whatever its specific merits, was essentially an unnecessary sideshow.
Second, the Bush administration in many ways enjoyed a remarkably favorable geopolitical environment. The collapse of our only global rival since World War II — the Soviet Union — gave the United States a unique freedom of action in Europe, the Middle East, and other regions around the world. We had never before enjoyed such scope for constructive diplomacy; we may never do so again.
But the record, though far from perfect, is still remarkable. “History” may have been going our way. But the elder Bush understood that moments of geopolitical alignment required a determined but deft policy to ensure that events move in directions advantageous to the United States. Even those decisions that created controversy at the time — not to “go to Baghdad” and topple Saddam Hussein, to maintain communications with the Chinese government after the Tiananmen Square massacre, to cross swords publicly with the Israeli government over its settlement policy — seem wiser with the passage of time.
When he was in office, President George H.W. Bush was often criticized for emphasizing “prudence.” The critics could not have been more wrong. Prudence — an understanding of the limits of power and an awareness of the risks associated with too precipitous a use of it — is an essential quality in any great statesman. And President George H.W. Bush was most assuredly that.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.