The second reason current judgments of Bush are likely to endure has to do with historical knowledge and causation. Americans have notoriously short political memories. At the start of the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein publicly invoked a seven-hundred-year-old Sunni grudge against Shia, comparing the American invasion of 2003 to the Mongol invasion of 1258. By contrast, most Americans would be hard-pressed to remember the name of Gerald Ford's vice president (it was Nelson Rockefeller), let alone anything earlier. In 1999, a University of Connecticut survey found that only 23 percent of seniors at America's top fifty colleges correctly identified James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution," while 98 percent knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg was a rapper.

When memories are short, timing is everything. The cold war's end illustrates just how powerful proximity can be. Many presidents waged the cold war, but Ronald Reagan is credited with ending it because he had one thing no one else did: good timing. The Soviet Union collapsed four decades after containment began but just three years after Reagan left office. There was nothing magical about 1991, and countless factors could have shifted the timing. What if Yuri Andropov's kidneys had been a little better, enabling the Soviet leader's hard-line regime to stay in power longer than fifteen months in the early 1980s? What if Boris Yeltsin's drinking had been a little worse, preventing him from facing down the August 1991 Communist coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or later demanding Gorbachev's resignation? Had the cold war lasted even a few years longer, Reagan's role would almost certainly be viewed differently.

Even the most optimistic projections of democratization in the Middle East are not banking on the short term. Rice sees the region moving at different speeds, with fast changes in Iraq and Afghanistan, where tyrannical regimes were "wiped away," but slower, more evolutionary progress toward political pluralism in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "I tend to think that everything is accelerated by rapid, modern communication and the shrinking of the globe, so that what might have taken sixty years might take twenty-five," she noted. "But," she added, "I don't think it will be five." General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander and Democratic presidential candidate, warned that the "rolling on of history" makes it unlikely that future successes will or even should be tied to current policies. When I asked him whether a democratic Middle East in the next century might revise history's judgment of the Bush administration, Clark replied, "Will we remake the Middle East in a hundred years? It's possible in the same way that the starvation of the Kulaks preceded in Ukraine to the Great War, which preceded the defeat of the Nazis, which preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the Soviet Union, there would be no free Ukraine today. So is it right to conclude that without the starvation of the Kulaks, there could be no free Ukraine today? People tend to assume ‘causations' from historical precedence." The history argument, Clark concluded, "just doesn't carry a lot of weight."

 

AN ANALYSIS of Bush's legacy cannot end simply with verdicts of his present performance. It must also incorporate a sense of his future influence. Given the near-universal criticism of Bush's foreign policy, it is hard to imagine that anything remotely related to it will last a day past January 20. Yet the truth is that Bush's big ideas are here to stay. Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, Bush's freedom agenda, which calls for spreading democracy to extend peace between states and combat terrorism within them, will almost certainly endure. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama criticize the war in Iraq, but champion the spread of democracy in the Middle East. They decry America's loss of moral standing in the world, but advocate a continuation of the American moral crusade. Although they attack Bush's tactics-suggesting we nurture alliances more and torture detainees less-they embrace Bush's core strategic vision: that peace and security are inextricably linked to the spread of liberty. Neither candidate has repudiated the freedom agenda. Ironically, George W. Bush, a president whom historian Simon Schama judged a "catastrophe," has set the intellectual foundations of American foreign policy for the next generation.

To understand how this could be, how a president so scorned by his contemporaries could forge the framework of the future, we need to look at the freedom agenda within the broader context of American foreign-policy history and the narrower context of strategic options the administration confronted after 9/11.

The freedom agenda was first articulated in 2003, then refined in the president's second inaugural address and the National Security Strategy of 2006. This was no do-gooder doctrine but an intimate marriage of interests and ideals. The freedom agenda advocated spreading democracy because it was both the right and safe thing to do: history had shown that democracies did not wage wars against each other, and 9/11 revealed that the root cause of extremist terrorism wasn't poverty, but the absence of political freedom. As Rice explained, if you look at where the 9/11 operatives grew up, "it was a Middle East that was an exception to almost every other region in the world, where there hadn't been movement toward democratization and pluralism, but rather where you had authoritarian governments that knocked out all of the political space for legitimate political discourse. . . . If you're going to have an answer for these people in radical mosques, then the answer can't be greater support for authoritarians that can crack down on them. The answer has to be providing the political space for some alternative form of political expression." So long as the Middle East stayed in the clutches of authoritarian rulers, the president warned, "it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export."

Contrary to popular belief, the freedom agenda's core ideas-the connection between security and liberty, the importance of American moral leadership in the world, the melding of interests and ideals in foreign policy-did not spring from the minds of Vice President Dick Cheney or a handful of neocon henchmen. They were first imagined by the Framers of the Constitution, have been embraced by both Democratic and Republican presidents throughout American history, and reflect a dualism inherent in the American foreign-policy tradition.

American foreign-policy attitudes have always been famously contradictory, embracing both Hobbes and Locke in a tense grip. The Founders were at once deeply suspicious of human nature and wildly optimistic about their American democratic experiment. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary," wrote Madison in Federalist 51. It could have been a page from Thucydides, whose ancient history of the Peloponnesian War captured the dog-eat-dog realist view of international politics with the line, "The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept." The Framers combined this sober-eyed view of the nature of man, the role of power and the inevitability of conflict with a dreamy optimism about the universality of American values and the righteousness of the American cause. "The world has its eye on America," wrote Alexander Hamilton. "The influence of our example has penetrated the gloomy regions of despotism." Hamilton looked forward to the day when American democracy would be blessed and imitated by the world. This uncomfortable duality-mixing both interests and ideals, pessimism and hope, stability and revolution-has always been part of America's DNA.

For much of American history, however, strategic necessity kept America's moral impulses mostly at bay. In the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, foreign policy was domestic policy. The fledgling United States was literally surrounded by ambitious European powers, with the British in Canada, the Spanish in Florida and the far West, and the French controlling vast swaths of territory in between, including navigation down the vital Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans. For generations, presidents did not have the luxury of promoting cherished American virtues abroad. They were too busy guarding against the looming threats of invasion and economic strangulation here at home. John Quincy Adams waxed eloquent about the glory of American liberty in 1821, but he also made perfectly clear that Americans could not be in the business of spreading that glory anywhere else. "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be," Adams declared. But America "goes not in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." As former-National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft noted, American foreign policy followed Adams for more than a hundred years. "When the French Revolution happened, we said ‘We wish you luck.' In Hungary in 1848, there were little Statues of Liberty everywhere there. And we said, ‘We wish you well,'?" said Scowcroft. "Not until Woodrow Wilson did we think we had an obligation to spread democracies."

Essay Types: First Draft of History