COLUMN-After U.S. elections, worse to come? Bernd Debusmann
(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)
By Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) - Presidential elections in the home of free enterprise regularly produce an array of paraphernalia, from campaign buttons and T-shirts to bumper stickers. This season, the range has been expanded by a large variety of Bush countdown devices.
They come as wall clocks, desk clocks, key chains and screen savers. They show the days, hours, minutes and seconds remaining until noon, Eastern Standard Time, on January 20, 2009, when the next president of the United States is sworn in. Most of the clientele for the device (from $9.95, batteries not included) are people who think that no matter who wins in November will be an improvement on Bush, lead the U.S. to a better future and restore America's prestige around the world.
They may be in for disappointment -- even though one of the candidates, Democratic Senator Barack Obama, shares that view. "Either Democrat would be better than John McCain," he said recently, referring to Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Republican nominee John McCain. "And all three of us would be better than George Bush."
Would they? Can one take that for granted? Particularly on foreign policy, it is not all that difficult to imagine a time of nostalgia, eventually, for George W. Bush. Let's assume for a moment that the winner will be McCain, the hawkish senator from Arizona who says the United States is the greatest force for good on earth and therefore must lead the world in the 21st century just as it did in the 20th.
If McCain gets a chance to implement his recently-introduced foreign policy blueprint, he will, in one fell swoop, antagonise China, insult Russia, undermine the United Nations, and set the U.S. against the majority of countries not fully under democratic rule. "We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world..."
Deciding who would qualify for the label "democratic" alone would cause enough friction to keep a good part of the U.S. foreign service busy for months. Would the League of Democracies be open to self-declared democracies? Welcome, Zimbabwe! Welcome, Kazakhstan! By one count, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are only 28 fully functioning democracies in the world.
McCain wants to expel Russia from the G8, the group of leading industralized nations, to punish it for "nuclear blackmail and cyber attacks." India and Brazil would be added to the group, China left outside, at least until it moves to political liberalisation.
This would not just be the extension of the Bush presidency to a third term, as both McCain's potential rivals for the presidency claim. This comes closer to a scenario for Cold War Two, with Russia and China cast in the role of malignant influences, the United States as global policeman, and confrontation a given. It reflects the world view of a septuagenarian stuck in the past.
CLINTON'S NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Hillary Clinton, a decade younger but sounding even more hawkish on some foreign policy issues, has also taken up themes reminiscent of the Cold War. If she became president, she has said, she would provide nuclear protection against Iran to Israel and Arab states friendly to the U.S. - an idea that boils down to a Middle Eastern version of NATO.
"Whatever...stage they (Iran) might be in their nuclear weapons programme in the next 10 years during which they might consider foolishly launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that," she said in a TV interview in May.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes and a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last November said Iran had halted its nuclear weapons development programme in 2003 and that it was unlikely the country could develop a bomb before 2015, if then. No mention from Clinton that the present (as opposed to possible future) nuclear power in the region is Israel.
Clinton's obliteration threat was shrugged off as campaign rhetoric by much of the U.S. media. Sharp language has earned her such a reputation for toughness that a union leader introducing her at a campaign rally praised her "testicular fortitude," an attribute he deemed essential for a president.
Clinton has sharply rebuked Obama, a foreign policy moderate and her rival for the democratic party's nomination, for saying he would sit down and talk to Iranian leaders and other U.S. adversaries rather than continue the Bush administration's policy of talking only to its friends and allies.
Obliterate is a hard word and it made headlines around the world, prompting alarmed reactions in various quarters. "This is the foreign politics of the madhouse," said an editorial in the Arab News of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, one of the countries she wants to put under an American nuclear umbrella. "It demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush's foreign relations."
In fairness to Bush, who declared Iran part of an Axis of Evil in 2002: he has never threatened to obliterate a country. Neither has any other American president since World War II, not even John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.
The clock is running out on the Bush version of doltish ignorance. But there's an even chance that the foreign politics of the madhouse will continue after January 20, 2009. (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com) (Editing by Sean Maguire)
By Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) - Presidential elections in the home of free enterprise regularly produce an array of paraphernalia, from campaign buttons and T-shirts to bumper stickers. This season, the range has been expanded by a large variety of Bush countdown devices.
They come as wall clocks, desk clocks, key chains and screen savers. They show the days, hours, minutes and seconds remaining until noon, Eastern Standard Time, on January 20, 2009, when the next president of the United States is sworn in. Most of the clientele for the device (from $9.95, batteries not included) are people who think that no matter who wins in November will be an improvement on Bush, lead the U.S. to a better future and restore America's prestige around the world.
They may be in for disappointment -- even though one of the candidates, Democratic Senator Barack Obama, shares that view. "Either Democrat would be better than John McCain," he said recently, referring to Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Republican nominee John McCain. "And all three of us would be better than George Bush."
Would they? Can one take that for granted? Particularly on foreign policy, it is not all that difficult to imagine a time of nostalgia, eventually, for George W. Bush. Let's assume for a moment that the winner will be McCain, the hawkish senator from Arizona who says the United States is the greatest force for good on earth and therefore must lead the world in the 21st century just as it did in the 20th.
If McCain gets a chance to implement his recently-introduced foreign policy blueprint, he will, in one fell swoop, antagonise China, insult Russia, undermine the United Nations, and set the U.S. against the majority of countries not fully under democratic rule. "We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world..."
Deciding who would qualify for the label "democratic" alone would cause enough friction to keep a good part of the U.S. foreign service busy for months. Would the League of Democracies be open to self-declared democracies? Welcome, Zimbabwe! Welcome, Kazakhstan! By one count, of the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are only 28 fully functioning democracies in the world.
McCain wants to expel Russia from the G8, the group of leading industralized nations, to punish it for "nuclear blackmail and cyber attacks." India and Brazil would be added to the group, China left outside, at least until it moves to political liberalisation.
This would not just be the extension of the Bush presidency to a third term, as both McCain's potential rivals for the presidency claim. This comes closer to a scenario for Cold War Two, with Russia and China cast in the role of malignant influences, the United States as global policeman, and confrontation a given. It reflects the world view of a septuagenarian stuck in the past.
CLINTON'S NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Hillary Clinton, a decade younger but sounding even more hawkish on some foreign policy issues, has also taken up themes reminiscent of the Cold War. If she became president, she has said, she would provide nuclear protection against Iran to Israel and Arab states friendly to the U.S. - an idea that boils down to a Middle Eastern version of NATO.
"Whatever...stage they (Iran) might be in their nuclear weapons programme in the next 10 years during which they might consider foolishly launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that," she said in a TV interview in May.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes and a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last November said Iran had halted its nuclear weapons development programme in 2003 and that it was unlikely the country could develop a bomb before 2015, if then. No mention from Clinton that the present (as opposed to possible future) nuclear power in the region is Israel.
Clinton's obliteration threat was shrugged off as campaign rhetoric by much of the U.S. media. Sharp language has earned her such a reputation for toughness that a union leader introducing her at a campaign rally praised her "testicular fortitude," an attribute he deemed essential for a president.
Clinton has sharply rebuked Obama, a foreign policy moderate and her rival for the democratic party's nomination, for saying he would sit down and talk to Iranian leaders and other U.S. adversaries rather than continue the Bush administration's policy of talking only to its friends and allies.
Obliterate is a hard word and it made headlines around the world, prompting alarmed reactions in various quarters. "This is the foreign politics of the madhouse," said an editorial in the Arab News of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, one of the countries she wants to put under an American nuclear umbrella. "It demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush's foreign relations."
In fairness to Bush, who declared Iran part of an Axis of Evil in 2002: he has never threatened to obliterate a country. Neither has any other American president since World War II, not even John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.
The clock is running out on the Bush version of doltish ignorance. But there's an even chance that the foreign politics of the madhouse will continue after January 20, 2009. (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com) (Editing by Sean Maguire)
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