A Half-Hearted Tribute to George Herbert Walker Bush
This is an excerpt, the rest of the article can be accessed via the link above.
Such considerations may well have prompted the restraint of George H.W. Bush that his son and Clinton threw to the wind. Kennan’s characterization of Russia and East-West relations rings prophetic. The elder Bush had been the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and had a fair amount of experience in foreign affairs. His refusal to “take out” Saddam Hussein and to expand NATO were hard-headed calculations based on that experience. The proponents of America’s ever-expanding interventionism had their way with Clinton and Bush, governors with little foreign policy experience. Hillary Clinton, who has sworn allegiance to the interventionist cause, and the two foreign policy neophytes who are shaping up as the frontrunners for the Republican nomination—former governor of Florida Jeb Bush and current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker—will be putty in their hands. Whoever ends up as president, the interventionists are assured that George H.W. Bush’s wisdom, limiting US power in Iraq and eastern Europe, will be nothing more than a historical memory, treated as an unenlightened curiosity of a bygone era.
Such considerations may well have prompted the restraint of George H.W. Bush that his son and Clinton threw to the wind. Kennan’s characterization of Russia and East-West relations rings prophetic. The elder Bush had been the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and had a fair amount of experience in foreign affairs. His refusal to “take out” Saddam Hussein and to expand NATO were hard-headed calculations based on that experience. The proponents of America’s ever-expanding interventionism had their way with Clinton and Bush, governors with little foreign policy experience. Hillary Clinton, who has sworn allegiance to the interventionist cause, and the two foreign policy neophytes who are shaping up as the frontrunners for the Republican nomination—former governor of Florida Jeb Bush and current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker—will be putty in their hands. Whoever ends up as president, the interventionists are assured that George H.W. Bush’s wisdom, limiting US power in Iraq and eastern Europe, will be nothing more than a historical memory, treated as an unenlightened curiosity of a bygone era.
