"George Bush: is he ready to lead America?" That was Al Gore's attack line in the final days before last year's presidential election. The biggest doubts over Bush's suitability for office concerned his inexperience and lack of knowledge about the world. On the campaign trail, an interviewer had ambushed Bush by asking him to name the leader of Pakistan (among other countries); Bush couldn't. During the first presidential debate, the moderator asked Bush for an example of how he had dealt with an unexpected crisis. Bush talked about an outbreak of severe flooding in Texas and the way he had comforted a family whose house had been swept away.
A year into his term of office, Bush's response to the terrorist assault of 11th September-the greatest crisis the US has faced in decades-has defined his presidency to the exclusion of almost everything else. Against expectation, the test of fire has salvaged Bush's reputation in the US, not undermined it. Before the attacks, he had already lost momentum. He had campaigned on a promise to end partisan squabbling in Washington, yet the ideological shrillness of his administration had caused the defection of a moderate Republican senator and handed control of the Senate to the Democrats. Bush's aides were complaining that his presidency seemed small.
Now, three months later, Bush has led his country through a war that enjoyed nearly universal support at home. In terms of US objectives, the conflict has gone well. After a shaky start, Bush has found a language and a style that seem to be what the American public is looking for in its time of trauma. He has also, in the tradition of wartime leaders, made himself very powerful. His administration has put in place a sweeping set of security measures that circumvent the usual oversight of Congress and the courts.
In the US, even Democrats now argue that Bush has risen to the occasion, displaying hitherto concealed focus and depth. At home, Bush enjoys the benefit of the doubt that Americans generally give their commander-in-chief during wartime. But with the advantage of distance, it is possible to come to a more balanced judgement about the way Bush and his team have responded to the attacks. It is also possible to see more continuity between his administration's policies and general outlook before and after 11th September than is generally recognised.
George Bush came into office with fewer popular votes than his opponent and after an election decided through a Supreme Court ruling that was widely viewed as partisan. Under these circumstances, many people expected him to govern from the centre. They were soon proved wrong, although they should not have been surprised. From the start, Bush conducted his presidency in the spirit in which he had campaigned-and in a way that is entirely representative of the internal tensions of modern Republicanism.
His catchphrase, "compassionate conservatism," has been taken as a synonym for "moderate centre-right," but that was always a mistake. The emphasis was equally on both halves of the formula: compassionate in style, conservative in ideology. His election campaign mixed the appeal of Bush's easygoing persona and his inclusive approach to Americans of all races, with a conventional conservative platform of lower taxes and laissez-faire at home and a more unilateralist stance in foreign policy. There were also a sprinkling of areas where socially desirable ends were pursued through conservative means: education reform through vouchers, and giving money to religious groups that carried out welfare programmes.
The package was tailored to the modern Republican coalition: a core of party activists, big industrial interests and the broad middle class of the American heartland. Tax cuts were the totemic issue for the activists, and deregulation for business, especially the oil industry (in which Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney had worked). But exit polls showed that Bush's biggest advantage amongst voters was in the category of "personal qualities" such as honesty and coming across as a regular guy who shared the values of the average (particularly white male) American.
The key to success for presidential candidates is to appear genial and apolitical to the voters, while delivering on the core issues that matter to the activists and businesses who give the party its shock troops and its funding. This was a formula that the first President Bush (whose background was in an older, patrician Republican party) flunked spectacularly. He alienated right-wing activists by raising taxes, while appearing uncaring and out-of-touch with the day-to-day concerns of middle Americans; he came across as neither compassionate nor conservative. By all accounts, the father's defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton was a formative moment in the son's political development and George W has been determined not to repeat the mistakes of George Snr.
Bush's cabinet appointments reflected both halves of the compassionate conservative equation. For a Republican administration, there was a striking number of women and minorities, including figures widely respected across the political spectrum, like Colin Powell as secretary of state and Christie Whitman at the Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, posts of particular significance to the right were given to doctrinaire hard-liners. The Justice department, which registers low on the scale of public attention but is watched obsessively by conservatives (because of its oversight of social issues like abortion), went to John Ashcroft-a Bible-bashing former governor who begins each working day with a prayer meeting. The woman chosen as secretary of interior, Gale Norton, was a former lobbyist who had worked for the chemical and oil industries. The Defence department, with control over the cherished right-wing project of national missile defence, was given to the enthusiast Donald Rumsfeld and (as deputy) the ultra-hawkish, intellectual Paul Wolfowitz. A less-noticed but telling appointment was to the post of under secretary of arms control and international security. This went (against Colin Powell's wishes) to John Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington's most outspoken opponents of international organisations.
Domestically, the major event of Bush's first six months was his tax cut. Bush first proposed the idea of a huge tax reduction ($1.6 trillion over the course of ten years) during the election campaign, as a way of distributing a large part of the budget surplus that was predicted for the US government over the next decade. By the time Bush, as president, was pushing the measure through Congress, the economic outlook had worsened. Bush now promoted the tax cut as a way to boost growth. The impression was of a symbolic gesture, divorced from its supposed justification. Nevertheless, Bush got the bulk of what he wanted-a tax cut of $1.35 trillion, primarily through reductions in personal income tax rates. The long-term effect is highly regressive. According to one estimate, the top 1 per cent of taxpayers will receive 37 per cent of the total benefit.
Over the 11-year cycle of the cuts, the figures could only be brought into balance through unconvincing accounting and sleight-of-hand. For instance, no money was set aside for increased defence spending, despite Bush's support for the expensive missile defence plan. The promise that the tax cut could be afforded without endangering the nation's finances or cutting back in other areas was only achieved, the economist Paul Krugman wrote, through "financial fakery that, if practiced by the executives of any publicly traded company, would have landed them in jail." The White House argued there would be plenty of money left for what Bush called "active but limited government," but conservative activists exulted that there would be no scope for new spending programmes for the foreseeable future.
The other key domestic measure was Bush's energy plan. It came against a background of rising oil prices and severe energy shortages in California, conditions which have now disappeared. The plan called for a big increase in US energy production, to be achieved through scaling back environmental regulation and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for exploration. Although dressed up with a handful of environmental measures, the plan was widely seen as a green light to the oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear industries. It passed largely unaltered through the House of Representatives in the summer and was due to be taken up by the Senate this autumn.
During his first months in the White House, Bush won high marks within Washington circles for the efficiency and discipline of his administration-which seemed a welcome contrast to Bill Clinton's shambolic style. However, the management-school approach of Bush's operatives had its costs. Behind the caring photo-ops, targets were pursued relentlessly-to the frustration of those who hoped for compromise as well as charm. Only a week after the publication of the energy plan, Bush suffered a huge political setback when James Jeffords, the moderate Republican senator from Vermont, left the party to become an independent. Jeffords cited the administration's extreme policies on the environment, missile defence, abortion and its lack of support for education as the reasons for his action. Before his defection, the Senate had been evenly split, which meant the Republicans could exercise control through the deciding vote of the vice-president. Now the Democrats were in charge of the Senate's agenda.
The same inflexibility marked Bush's initial steps in foreign policy. Many international observers had counted on Colin Powell as secretary of state to steer the US on a steady course. Powell did have an early success when he negotiated a solution to the stand-off with China over the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet. In other areas, however, the administration's approach was not diplomatic persuasion but take-it-or-leave-it unilateralism. Bush's priority in foreign affairs (by some accounts, his only real interest) was the "son of Star Wars" missile defence programme. To pursue this would breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Disregarding the misgivings of America's allies, Bush made it clear that the Russians had no choice but to renegotiate the treaty or watch the US ditch it.
Across the board, international treaty-making was downgraded in favour of a narrower calculation of the national interest. Clinton and his foreign policy team-notably Madeleine Albright at the State department and Richard Holbrooke at the UN-had at heart been liberal internationalists: they believed in the progressive expansion of an international community based on law. Under Bush, a different ethos has prevailed-one rooted in the cold war background of key figures such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the influential outsider, Richard Perle. This circle argued that international agreements should not be seen as a good in themselves, but only pursued when they benefited the US and could be clearly enforced. Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State department, described this as "? la carte multilateralism": America would work through international bodies when that suited it. The rationale was coherent, but made no concessions to the resentment other countries might feel at the US's power to walk away from the table. The administration's approach assumed that the international system worked on the basis of power and not legitimacy.
The roll-call of agreements that Bush jettisoned in his first six months is long. He announced that he was withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol on climate change, arguing that it demanded unreasonable sacrifices from the US. When Colin Powell told allies that the US would produce an alternative proposal on carbon dioxide emissions by October, he was publicly contradicted by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Bush also announced that the White House would not ask for ratification of the treaty setting up an international criminal court, which Clinton had signed on his last day of office. He refused to sign up to a draft agreement updating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, in part because US manufacturers objected to the inspection provisions, and he insisted that an accord aimed at reducing sales of handguns be diluted. The perception in Washington was that the hawks in the administration had won Bush's ear. At the end of the summer, Time ran a cover asking, "Where have you gone, Colin Powell?"
This was how things stood on the morning of 11th September. Bush was at a school in Florida when news of the attacks came through. In a tone-deaf phrase that drew wide comment, he promised to get the "folks who committed this act." According to an account that his adviser Karl Rove gave to the New Yorker, Bush then spent most of the day on the telephone in Air Force One-talking mostly to the influential Cheney. When he appeared to address the nation on television, Bush looked distinctly nervous. His failure to return to Washington more quickly revealed an inexperienced, passive leader, ill-equipped to over-ride the occupational caution of his security advisers.
Nevertheless, Bush rallied. Within days, the administration's response was fixed: a campaign to bring the terrorists to justice, dismantle their organisation and that of other terrorist groups "of global reach," and make sure that no states continued to provide a haven for international terrorism. The "war on terrorism" would include police work, intelligence co-ordination and moves to take apart the financial networks that funded terrorist outfits. Crucially, the response would be measured and proceed with the widest international backing. According to Washington insiders, Bush's father intervened to make sure that Colin Powell should be given the central role in the administration's efforts to come up with a strategy that would win international support.
Bush deserves credit for avoiding a knee-jerk response, and for steadying the American population for a campaign that would be drawn out and methodical. He also went out of his way to dampen down any reprisals against the Muslim community in America. The low level of violent incidents belied the charge sometimes heard in Britain, that Americans were ready to lash out randomly in blind rage.
There was never any doubt that the US would respond with military force against Afghanistan. To leave Osama bin Laden and his network undisturbed would have been seen as a dereliction of leadership. The Taleban had refused to hand bin Laden over before, despite clear evidence of his involvement in previous attacks against US targets, and there was not the slightest indication that they were now prepared to co-operate. The core of Bush's strategy would have been the same under any conceivable elected leader. A senior Clinton official, Rahm Emanuel, recently told the New York Times there would not have been "a lick of difference" in America's response if Al Gore had been president. Indeed Gore's chief foreign policy adviser, Leon Fuerth, has written a string of articles praising Bush's "forceful" approach to the crisis. The only real criticism of the administration's leadership has come from the right, some of whom fretted before the fall of Kabul that the war was not being pursued aggressively enough.
The attacks destroyed the idea that America was invulnerable. Since the end of the cold war, foreign policy had been a kind of governmental luxury in the US: a field for official visionaries or hobbyists. With the shattering of this illusion came an awareness that America could not stand alone in the world. And at first sight, it appeared that the Bush administration was performing a U-turn in world view. The government built assiduously on the wave of sympathy for America. Pakistan in particular was courted. Russia and even China were f?ted as valued partners in a global cause. Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and (through Britain) Iran were pressed for assistance. There was a new solicitousness toward the UN: payment of over $800m that the US owed was authorised and the administration worked to obtain a unanimous resolution of the security council that reaffirmed the right of self-defence against terrorism.
These were significant changes, but they shouldn't be mistaken for something more than a tactical readjustment. Bush has put together an alliance directed toward the specific aim of eliminating global terrorism, but there is no sign that he has been converted to a new picture of international community. In this instance, faced with an urgent challenge, a global coalition is in US interests. It remains a fundamentally pragmatic grouping, based more on a series of bilateral trade-offs than any grand principle. In exchange for their support, Russia will probably get more lenience over their human rights abuses in Chechnya; Pakistan's nuclear programme and lack of democracy will be accepted; Uzbekistan's unsavoury regime will gain international legitimacy. These may be sensible compromises, but they are not the building blocks of a liberal international order.
In his advocacy for the war, Tony Blair has argued that it can be the launch pad for a new push toward global justice. But when Bush says that "this is only the beginning of our efforts in the world," he is talking merely about rooting out terrorism. For all the administration's diplomacy, it has made little effort to reach beyond the governments whose support it needs and win backing from their populations for the justice of its cause. His repeated characterisation of bin Laden as "the evil one" represents a sentimentalised worldview that has little resonance outside America. Bush and Powell tried, unsuccessfully, to launch a new initiative for peace in the middle east. But the administration has missed the chance to offer a wider vision of the world, bound together by the principles of civilisation that bin Laden has breached.
Inside Afghanistan, the administration's conduct of the war has been militarily effective. Inevitably, working through local forces has brought it into alliance with some unattractive groups. Still, for a conflict fought in the name of justice, Bush and his cabinet have often seemed cavalier with humanitarian law. Donald Rumsfeld has spoken with disarming bluntness about the desirability of killing Taleban and al Qaeda fighters, and implied that he would rather bin Laden were not taken alive. Bush recently announced that suspected foreign terrorists (from Afghanistan or elsewhere) might be tried before military tribunals with severely restricted rights.
More broadly, the administration's negative views on international organisation have not been abandoned. Although Bush has promised a long-term assistance programme for Afghanistan, he has also made it clear that American troops will not hang around to engage in what he calls "nation-building"-they are simply too tempting a target. And despite the anthrax letters in the US, the administration last month sent John Bolton to Geneva to reiterate its objections to the updating of the Biological Weapons Convention. In fact, the Bush government's most internationalist initiative has come not in the field of security but trade. At the recent meeting of the WTO in Qatar, the US representative Robert Zoellick helped to shape an agreement that gave the interests of the developing world significantly more weight on the trading agenda. He made an important concession over poor countries' demands for access to cheap drugs in public heath emergencies, and agreed to negotiate over America's use of so-called "anti-dumping" rules. Zoellick has also forged a harmonious working relationship with the EU, in alliance with his friend Pascal Lamy.
Since 11th September, Bush has concentrated almost solely on the war and domestic security. But the inexperience of those in charge on the home front has been in painful contrast to the confidence projected by Powell, Rumsfeld and Cheney in foreign and military policy. In particular, the changed circumstances have thrust the conservative John Ashcroft unexpectedly into the limelight. As head of the Justice department, he is responsible for law enforcement and his extreme actions have given the impression of desperation and over-reaction (even more than in Britain). Over 1,000 foreign nationals have been arrested with little explanation; many are still being held, though none has yet been charged in connection with any terrorist activity. Ashcroft has also issued an order allowing federal agents to eavesdrop on conversations between terror suspects and their lawyers without authorisation from a judge.
Further, Bush created a new position of director of homeland security and gave it to a close political ally, Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. Ridge has struggled to assert control over the entrenched bureaucracies of the many Washington institutions that his brief encompasses. At the height of the anthrax scare, his press conferences were often inaccurate and confusing and did more to generate alarm than confidence. Ashcroft and Ridge have also been criticised for a series of vague statements that another terrorist attack might be imminent. When nothing happened, officials suggested that the warnings had helped to forestall it.
Meanwhile, due in part to the attacks, the economic picture has continued to worsen. The country is in recession and the projected budget surpluses that were supposed to pay for Bush's tax cuts are now shrinking rapidly. In a sign of a limited resumption of normal politics, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are engaged in partisan warfare over the shape of a stimulus package: should it emphasise tax cuts or government spending? By linking the economic slowdown to 11th September, the administration may be able to deflect blame for the way its promises have been so rapidly falsified. In the months ahead, Bush will face some hugely troublesome political decisions. Should he go back on some of his tax cuts, advocate a reduction in spending on popular programmes, or let the deficit balloon again? The choices he makes will begin to define the real substance of Bush's domestic presidency.
Abroad, too, the crucial questions for Bush lie ahead. His more hawkish advisers are pressing for a move against Iraq as "stage two" of the war on terrorism. Bush's recent speeches have sounded warnings that Saddam Hussein must re-admit UN inspectors or face the consequences. If America launches a military operation to remove Saddam it would mark the end of Bush's international coalition and restore his reputation as a unilateral bully. It is hard to imagine how terrorism could be substantially reduced-let alone eliminated-in the way Bush envisages, simply by mobilising the security resources of America. An alternative approach is conceivable. the US could use its power in the world to begin to deal with some of the conditions that help terrorists gain legitimacy. It could resolve to shape an international system in which American predominance co-exists with a more principled global order, in which more societies feel they have a stake in the system. But that would require a shift in Bush's outlook that, currently, seems inconceivable.
