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ABSTRACT
This article reassesses the foreign policy legacy of George W. Bush in light of the emerging historical record of his administration. We conclude that, whereas Bush’s foreign policy was in widespread disrepute when he left office in 2009, that reputation is likely to improve – perhaps significantly – in the coming years. We identify six particular arguments that lend credence to an emerging ‘Bush revisionism.’ To be clear, we do not necessarily argue that the balance sheet on Bush’s foreign policy was positive, but the arguments presented here are likely to generate a more sympathetic and favorable historical assessment of Bush’s presidency over time.
Disclosure statement
Brands served as a political appointee in the Defense Department in Obama’s second term and Feaver served as a political appointee in the White House in Bush’s second term.
Notes
1 The work that best represented this shift in views was David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster 1992). That biography built on a significant body of scholarly work, often more specialized in nature, on Truman’s presidency.
2 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown 2010), 174–75. See also Lou Cannon and Carl Cannon, Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy (New York: Public Affairs 2008), 299–303; George W. Bush, ‘Commencement address at the United States military academy in west point, New York’, 27 May 2006, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=83>.
3 Michael Cohen, ‘The best and worst foreign policy presidents of the past century’, The Atlantic, 30 Jul. 2011, <http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/the-best-and-worst-foreign-policy-presidents-of-the-past-century/242781/>.
4 History News Network, ‘HNN Poll: 61% of historians rate the Bush presidency worst’, 6 Nov. 2008, <http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/48916>. For an extreme and exaggerated critique, see Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon and Schuster 2016). For an early proto-revisionist portrayal, see John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Ending Tyranny’, The American Interest 4/1 (Sep/Oct. 2008), 6–15.
5 See Michael Cooper, ‘McCain distances himself from Bush’, New York Times, 4 Jun. 2008; Steve Holland, ‘McCain slowly but surely distancing self from Bush’, Reuters, 2 May 2008.
6 The classic work was Fred Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic Books 1982); also Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press 1981).
7 See, for instance, Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan’s and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House 2005); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press 2005); Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2016).
8 Indeed, one of us has earlier taken many of these defenses of Bush’s record into account and still concluded that the negatives of his foreign policy outweighed the positives. See Hal Brands, What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2014) Ch. 4.
9 For recent accounts that stress, either implicitly or explicitly, the need for such empathy, see Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Doubleday 2013); and Melvyn Leffler, ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy’, Diplomatic History 37/2 (Apr. 2013), 190–216.
10 Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-Qaeda (New York: Simon & Schuster 2011), 69–85.
11 This section builds on arguments first developed in Stephen Biddle and Peter Feaver, ‘Assessing Strategic Choices in the War on Terror’, in James Burk (ed.), How 9/11 Changed Our Ways of War (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 2013), 27–55.
12 For more pessimistic contemporary assessments, see R.W. Apple, Jr., ‘A military quagmire remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam’, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2001; also John Mearsheimer, ‘Guns won’t win the Afghan war’, New York Times, 4 Nov. 2001.
13 See Peter John Paul Krause, ‘The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora’, Security Studies 17/4 (2008), 644–84.
14 On the fear of replicating the Soviet experience in Afghanistan during the 1980s, see Donald Rumsfeld to Bush, 20 Aug. 2001, Rumsfeld Papers (RP); Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown (New York: Penguin 2011), 367–68; Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt, ‘A war on a small scale, possibly long and risky’, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2001. On Afghan favorable views of the US intervention, see Gary Langer, ‘2005 poll: four years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghans optimistic about the future’, ABCNews.com, 7 Dec. 2005, <http://abcnews.go.com/International/PollVault/story?id=1363276>.
15 On the idea of Iraq as an unnecessary war, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, Foreign Policy (Jan/Feb. 2003), 51–9; also Richard Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster 2009).
16 See F. Gregory Gause, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (New York: Cambridge University Press 2010), Ch. 6.
17 On US intelligence (and its failures) prior to 2003, see Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2010), Ch. 3. It is important to note here that, although the Bush administration did exaggerate the strength of the intelligence on Saddam’s WMD programs, bipartisan investigations have now confirmed that the administration did not exert undue pressure on intelligence analysts, or simply manufacture intelligence about Saddam’s regime from whole cloth. Rather, the overestimation of Saddam’s WMD programs stemmed largely from longstanding errors in tradecraft and analysis within the intelligence community. See Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, ‘Report to the president of the United States’, 31 Mar. 2005, <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/wmd_report.pdf>; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, ‘Report on the U.S. intelligence community’s prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq’, 7 Jul. 2004, <http://web.mit.edu/simsong/www/iraqreport2-textunder.pdf>.
18 Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Knopf 2004), 54.
19 As we have noted elsewhere, however, the US presence in Saudi Arabia is not the only rationale for jihadist attacks on the United States. See Hal Brands, The Limits of Offshore Balancing (Carlisle PA: Strategic Studies Institute 2015), Esp. 30–2; Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, ‘Trump and Terrorism: U.S. Strategy after ISIS’, Foreign Affairs 96/2 (Mar/Apr. 2017), 28–36.
20 ‘Iraq Liberation Act of 1998’, Public Law 105–338, 105th Congress, 1998.
21 Frank Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic, and Evidence (New York: Cambridge University Press 2012), 47–50, 77–8.
22 John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘Keeping Saddam Hussein in a box’, New York Times, 2 Feb. 2003.
23 New York Times, ‘No Illusions about Iraq’, 27 Dec. 1988.
24 See, for instance, Kevin M. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Norfolk VA: United States Joint Forces Command 2006).
25 Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: Norton 2007), 12, 186; also Melvyn Leffler, ‘9/11 and American Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History29/3 (Jun. 2005), 395–413; Leffler, ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration’; Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold 2011), 328–63; Bush, Decision Points.
26 See Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2003), 118–19; Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins 2008), 51, 216–17.
27 As Vice-President Dick Cheney famously remarked, if there was even a ‘one percent chance’ that al-Qaeda might acquire a nuclear weapon, ‘We have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.’ Quoted in Glenn Kessler, ‘U.S. decision on Iraq has puzzling past’, Washington Post, 12 Jan. 2003; also Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster 2006), 62.
28 On these points, see Kevin Woods, Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents (Alexandria VA: Institute for Defense Analyses 2007); Iraq Survey Group, ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD’, 30 Sep. 2004, <https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004>.
29 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, ‘The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Executive Summary’, 2004, <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.htm>.
30 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster 2004), 27.
31 Jack Straw to Tony Blair, Apr. 2002, <http://webarchive.org/web/20100723165758/http://www.michaelsmithwriter.com/memo_six.html>.
32 Quoted in ‘Interview with Tim Russert on NBC News’ “Meet the Press”’, 29 Apr. 2007, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=77742>.
33 The phrase comes from Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice. For an even stronger argument to this effect, see Harvey, Explaining the Iraq War.
34 See Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy?, Ch. 4.
35 The comprehensive Duelfer report rebutted some elements of Bush’s pre-war rationale and confirmed other parts. The report confirmed that Saddam Hussein had destroyed much of his existing WMD arsenal and that efforts to build new capabilities were not as far advanced as Bush thought. But the report also showed that, as Bush claimed, Hussein was trying to game the inspection regime and fully intended to ramp up his WMD programs as soon as he could get out from under the sanctions. See Iraq Survey Group, ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD with Addendums’, Central Intelligence Agency, 30 Sep. 2004, <https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004>.
36 This is a major theme of Britain’s ‘Chilcot Report.’ See ‘The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, “Executive Summary”’, 6 Jul. 2016, 40–7, <http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/>.
37 See Nora Bensahel, et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning for the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica CA: RAND Corporation 2008), xvii.
38 Bush, Decision Points, 180.
39 George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: Harper Collins 2007), 229, 239, 245–47.
40 Bush, Decision Points, 151–53, 157–58.
41 Quoted in Rumsfeld to Myers and Pace, 10 Oct. 2001, Rumsfeld Papers.
42 CNN.com, ‘Source: ‘100-percent Chance’ of Another Attack: Lawmakers Caution There’s No Specific Threat’,5Oct. 2001.
43 Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 187.
44 John Lehmann, ‘New Attacks Coming: Cheney – “It’s Not a Matter of If – but When”’, New York Post, 20 May 2002.
45 The estimate comes from Lawrence Wright, ‘The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda Mastermind Questions Terrorism’, New Yorker, 2 Jun. 2008, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-rebellion-within>. This point also stands as an important corrective to the myth that Bin Laden expected and hoped for the kind of US response he actually generated with his attack so as to draw the United States into a quagmire. On the contrary, he expected some sort of mild punitive response and was taken by surprise by the administration’s decision to undertake major military operations in Afghanistan. See also Bergen, Longest War, 86–94.
46 Daniel Byman, ‘Are We Winning the War on Terrorism?’, Brookings Institution, Middle East Memo, 23 May 2003, <https://www.brookings.edu/research/are-we-winning-the-war-on-terrorism/>.
47 Juan Zarate, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare (New York: Public Affairs 2013); Daniel Byman, ‘Scoring the war on terror’, The National Interest, Summer 2003, Esp. 78.
48 Stephen Slick and Michael Allen, ‘The Office of the DNI’s Greatest Hits’, Foreign Policy, 21 Apr. 2015, <http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/21/dni-september-11-terrorism-clapper/>.
49 As the author of one extensive analysis writes, ‘Even the much-mocked Transportation Security Administration…has probably improved security, not because its methods are foolproof but because even a small increase in the risk of detection can make a big difference in a world-be terrorist’s mental calculus.’ Timothy Noah, ‘Why No More 9/11s?’ Slate, 5 Mar. 2009.
50 Dallas Boyd, Lewis A. Dunn, and James Scouras, ‘Why Has the United States Not Been Attacked Again?’ The Washington Quarterly 32/3 (Jul. 2009), 4–5.
51 Dana Milbank and Emily Wax, ‘Bush Visits Mosque to Forestall Hate Crimes’, Washington Post, 18 Sep. 2001.
52 ‘Islam is Peace, Says President’, 17 Sep. 2001, <https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html>.
53 See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, ‘The 9/11 Commission Report’, 2004, <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf>.
54 See, for instance, Jose Rodriguez and Bill Harlow, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster 2012).
55 See Ali Soufan, The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda (New York: Penguin Books 2011); Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, ‘Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’, Apr. 2014, <https://archive.org/details/ssci-cia-torture-report-executive-summary>. The conclusiveness of the Senate report, however, remains somewhat contested. The strongest denunciations of effectiveness come in the portion of the report signed only by the Democrats on the committee and were rebutted by the Republicans in their own minority report. For a strong critique of the report (that nevertheless strongly criticizes the CIA), see Robert Jervis, ‘The Torture Blame Game: The Botched Senate Report on the CIA’s Misdeeds’, Foreign Affairs 74/3 (May/Jun. 2015), <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/2015-04-20/torture-blame-game>.
56 To be clear, the Bush administration and its defenders subsequently sought to draw bright lines distinguishing (a) the unauthorized abuses at Abu Ghraib, from (b) the controversial but clearly delimited Enhanced Interrogation Program, and from (c) the indefinite detention of terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. But Pape’s argument is that jihadis inspired to join al-Qaeda nevertheless saw those lines as blurry or nonexistent and invoked them collectively in a single rallying cry. See Pape’s detailed analysis in ‘Forum on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report and the United States’ Post-9/11 Policy on Torture’, International Security Studies Forum, 16 Feb. 2015, <https://issforum.org/forums/ssci-report-torture#_Toc411763045>.
57 Mark Mazzetti, ‘Spy agencies say Iraq war worsens terrorism threat’, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2006.
58 Dana Priest, ‘Iraq new terror breeding ground’, Washington Post, 14 Jan. 2005.
59 See CNN.com, ‘Transcript: CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer’, 27 Jul. 2003, <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/27/le.00.html>.
60 Boyd, Dunn, and Scouras, ‘Why Has the United States Not Been Attacked Again?’ 10.
61 See Samina Ahmed, ‘Pakistan’s Tribal Areas: Appeasing the Militants’, Crisis Group Asia Report 125/11 (Dec. 2006), <https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/pakistan/pakistan-s-tribal-areas-appeasing-militants>.
62 National Intelligence Estimate, The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland (Washington DC: National Intelligence Council Jul. 2007), <http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb270/18.pdf>.
63 See New America, ‘Drone Wars Pakistan: Analysis’, <http://securitydata.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan-analysis.html>. According to this source, the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan increased ninefold – from 4 to 36 – from 2007 to 2008.
64 Another potential critique of the ‘he kept us safe’ argument, not discussed in detail here for reasons of space, is that even if U.S. counter-terrorism programs were narrowly successful in averting follow-on attacks, the expenditures and opportunity costs involved were not worth the benefits reaped. For a version of this argument, see John Mueller and Mark Stewart, ‘The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11’, International Security 37/1 (Summer 2012), 81–110.
65 Jack Goldsmith, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 (New York: Norton 2012), x.
66 Goldsmith, Power and Constraint, 3–22; also Jack Goldsmith and Matthew Waxman, ‘The Legal Legacy of Light-Footprint Warfare’, The Washington Quarterly 39/2 (Summer 2016), 7–21.
67 Obama’s approach to Pakistan was itself a double-edged sword since the kinetic campaign violated local sensibilities on sovereignty and, arguably, exacerbated tensions with the Pakistani government and its people.
68 A good early account is Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra Two: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon 2006). For a particularly scathing account, see Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006).
69 See, for instance, Peter Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven: Yale University Press 2013); also Kimberly Kagan, The Surge: A Military History (New York: Encounter Books 2008); and many memoirs by Bush administration veterans.
70 See Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro, ‘Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?’ International Security 37/1 (Summer 2012), 7–40. Bush administration officials saw these two elements as collectively part of the surge. See Stephen Hadley, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Peter Feaver, ‘How the Surge Came to Be’, in Hal Brands, Jeffrey Engel, William Inboden, and Timothy Sayle (eds.), The Last Card in the Deck: Inside George W. Bush’s 2007 Iraq Surge Decision ((Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press forthcoming).
71 On the effectiveness of the surge and the evisceration of AQI, see Mansour, Surge; also Bergen, The Longest War, 266–96.
72 Baker, Days of Fire, 520; also the essays and transcripts in Brands, Engel, Inboden, and Sayle (eds.), Last Card in the Deck.
73 Colin Dueck, ‘The President as Policy Entrepreneur: George W. Bush and the 2006 Iraq Strategy Review’, in Hal Brands, Engel Inboden, and Timothy Sayle (eds.), Last Card in the Deck (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press forthcoming); also Colin Dueck, ‘The Role of the National Security Advisor and the 2006 Iraq Strategy Review’, Orbis 58/1 (Winter 2014), 15–38; Stephen Dyson, ‘George W. Bush, the Surge, and Presidential Leadership’, Political Science Quarterly 125/4 (Winter 2010), 557–85.
74 We make this case in much greater detail in Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, ‘Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable?’ Survival 59/3 (Jun-Jul. 2017), 7–54.
75 See Kenneth Pollack, ‘Reading Machiavelli in Iraq’, The National Interest, Nov/Dec. 2012, pp. 8–19; Dexter Filkins, ‘What We Left Behind’, The New Yorker, 28 Apr. 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/what-we-left-behind>; Rick Brennan, ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: The Bungling of the Iraq Exit’, Foreign Affairs 93/6 (2014), 25–34; Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs 2015), 330–59.
76 See, for instance, Hagan, John, et al., ‘Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq’, International Security 37/4 (Spring 2013), 173–98; see also Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: Free Press 2013), 85–112; Joshua Rovner, ‘The Heroes of COIN’, Orbis (Spring 2012), 215–32.
77 This is the argument made, for instance, in Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? Ch. 4.
78 Colin Kahl, ‘No, Obama Didn’t Lose Iraq’, Politico, 15 Jun. 2014, <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/no-obama-didnt-lose-iraq-107874>.
79 Brands and Feaver, ‘Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable?’.
80 One counter-revisionist argument that does not stand up to careful scrutiny is the idea that since Bush signed the original Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Maliki in 2008, he should be blamed for the eventual withdrawal of US forces at the end of 2011. It was widely understood that the Bush administration intended the SOFA to be amended to permit a post-2011 US presence, an interpretation confirmed by the fact that Obama administration officials indeed sought to amend that agreement – and predicted, prior to the breakdown of negotiations in 2011, that they would be successful in doing so. These dynamics are covered in Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Pantheon 2012), 523–59, 651–71.
81 See Thomas Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2003); H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press 1995); Hal Brands, ‘Progress Unseen: U.S. Arms Control Policy and the Origins of Détente, 1963–1968’, Diplomatic History 30/2 (2006), 253–85; Hal Brands, ‘Rethinking Nonproliferation: LBJ, the Gilpatric Committee, and U.S. National Security Policy’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8/2 (2006), 83–113.
82 Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown 2012), 436–42; also Ashley Tellis, ‘The Merits of Dehyphenation: Explaining U.S. Success in Engaging India and Pakistan’, The Washington Quarterly 31/4 (2008), 21–42.
83 Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: Norton 2015), Esp. Ch. 7.
84 See Michael Green, By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press 2017), 482–517; Michael Green, ‘The Iraq War and Asia: Assessing the Legacy’, The Washington Quarterly 31/2 (2008), 181–200; Nina Silove, ‘The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia’, International Security 40/4 (2016), 45–88.
85 See, for instance, Cristina Soreanu Pecequilo, ‘A New Strategic Dialogue: Brazil-U.S. Relations in Lula’s Presidency (2003–2010)’, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 53 (Dec. 2010), 132–50; also Rothkopf, National Insecurity, Esp. 99–107.
86 For a balanced assessment, see Russell Crandall, ‘Colombia’s Catastrophic Success’, The American Interest 9/3 (Jan/Feb. 2014), 58–65.
87 See, for instance, Andrew Winner, ‘The Proliferation Security Initiative: The New Face of Interdiction’, The Washington Quarterly 28/2 (Spring 2005), 129–43.
88 See, for instance, Bruce Jentleson and Christopher Whytock, ‘Who “Won” Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy’, International Security 30/3 (Winter 2005/06), 47–86.
89 See ‘The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief: Funding and Results’, http://www.pepfar.gov/funding/; ‘Press Gaggle by President Obama aboard Air Force One’, 28 Jun. 2013, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/28/press-gaggle-president-obama-aboard-air-force-one>; Rochelle Walensky and Daniel Kuritzkes, ‘The Impact of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPfAR) beyond HIV and Why It Remains Essential’, Clinical Infectious Diseases 50/2 (2012), 272–75.
90 As of Jun. 2017, the Iraq Body Count estimated that there had been a total of 268,000 violent deaths as a result of the Iraq war. See <https://www.iraqbodycount.org/>.
91 On Millennium Challenge, see Stephen Hook, ‘Ideas and Change in U.S. Foreign Aid: Inventing the Millennium Challenge Corporation’, Foreign Policy Analysis 4/2 (Apr. 2008), 147–67. One could also argue that Bush was perceptive on a number of foreign policy points, even where his administration failed to deliver significant results. He rightly saw the need for reform of Palestinian governing structures as an essential precursor to lasting peace with Israel, for instance – although as Elliott Abrams acknowledges, the administration perhaps did not carry this insight far enough. See Elliott Abrams, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press 2013).
92 On this episode, see Henry Paulson, Jr., On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (New York: Grand Central Publishing 2011); Baker, Days of Fire, 607–17, 621–28.
93 On the origins and course of the crisis, see Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office 2011).
94 The two authors disagree somewhat on how to weight these factors, but we agree that both were involved to a meaningful degree.
95 See, for instance, Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: Norton 2010); quote from Rice, No Higher Honor, 636.
96 A good source is Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2008).
97 Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United Sates (New Haven: Yale University Press 2007), 240–44, 253; Glenn Kessler, ‘Rice denies seeing Iranian proposal in ’03’, Washington Post, 8 Feb. 2007.
98 See the declassified National Intelligence Estimate, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities (National Intelligence Council Nov. 2007), <https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/international/20071203_release.pdf>.
99 The evolution of U.S. strategy is discussed in Jordan Chandler Hirsh, ‘How America bamboozled itself about Iran’, Commentary, Mar. 2015, <https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-america-bamboozled-itself-about-iran-1/>; also Flynt Leverett, Dealing with Tehran: Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options toward Iran (New York: Century Foundation 2006); Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iraq: Power and Paradox in the Islamic Republic (New York: Times Books 2006), 127–29.
100 In fairness to the Bush administration, some of the more vociferous critiques of U.S. policy – to the extent that the United States had materially supported the coup or incited the Venezuelan opposition to overthrow Chavez – were vastly exaggerated. For a defense of U.S. policy, see Rice, No Higher Honor, 255–56.
101 On the Georgia conflict, see Ronald Asmus, The Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010).
102 See Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires, 127–29; David Rohde and David Sanger, ‘How a “Good War” in Afghanistan went bad’, New York Times, 12 Aug. 2007; Steven Simon, ‘The Iraq War and the War on Terror: The Global Jihad after Iraq’, in John S. Duffield and Peter Dombrowski (eds.), Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and U.S. National Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009), 35.
103 Sanger, The Inheritance, 283; Green, ‘Iraq War and Asia’, 192; see also Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? 183–85.
104 Green, ‘Iraq War and Asia.’
105 The costs are discussed in Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? Ch. 4; also Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: Norton 2008).
106 This is not to argue that the costs of Iraq exceeded or were less than the costs of Vietnam – an issue that informed observers could argue either way – but simply to note that in both cases, a frustrating and costly conflict loomed over other foreign policy issues and achievements.
107 Rice, No Higher Honor, 22; Hadley in Ivo Daalder and I.M. Destler, In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents They Served – From JFK to George W. Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster 2009), 293.
108 Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 45.
109 See the foregoing discussion of the Iraq surge.
110 See, for instance, Glenn Kessler, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy (New York: Macmillan 2007) Ch. 2.
111 Mark Webber, ‘NATO: The United States, Transformation, and the War in Afghanistan’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11/1 (2009), 46–63; also Philip Gordon, ‘The End of the Bush Revolution’, Foreign Affairs 85/4 (Jul/Aug. 2006), 75–86.
112 Hirsh, ‘How America Bamboozled Itself about Iran.’
113 Rice, No Higher Honor, 564–72; also Hal Brands, Dealing with Political Ferment in Latin America: The Populist Revival, the Emergence of the Center, and Implications for U.S. Policy (Carlisle PA: Strategic Studies Institute 2009); Clare Ribando Seelke and June Beittel, Merida Initiative for Mexico and Central America: Funding and Policy Issues (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service 2009).
114 Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 48.
115 Daalder and Destler, In the Shadow of the Oval Office, 292–97; Rothkopf, National Insecurity, 47–52; Peter Feaver and William Inboden, ‘What Was the Point of SPIR? Strategic Planning in National Security at the White House’, in Daniel Drezner (ed.), Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings Press 2009), 98–111.
116 See, particularly, Baker, Days of Fire; for a portrayal of Cheney at the height of his influence, see Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Press 2008).
117 On these issues, see the oral histories reproduced in Brands, Engel, Inboden, and Sayle (eds.), Last Card in the Deck.
118 See Chinoy, Meltdown.
119 Julian Barnes, ‘U.S. calls Iraq the priority’, Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 2007.
120 ‘President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address’, 20 Jan. 2005, <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172>. The administration took pains to caveat and explain the poetry of the Second Inaugural with the prose of the 2006 National Security Strategy, which received a more sympathetic reception from critics. See Ivo H. Daalder, ‘Statement on the 2006 National Security Strategy’, Brookings Institution, 16 Mar. 2006, <https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/statement-on-the-2006-national-security-strategy/> .
121 Early assessments of Obama’s presidency include Derek Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World (New York: Public Affairs 2016); Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama doctrine’, The Atlantic, Apr. 2016; Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today (New York: Oxford University Press 2015); Mark Moyar, Strategic Failure: How President Obama’s Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts, and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America (New York: Threshold 2015).
122 Though even here fair-minded critics have offered thoughtful critiques of each of these – the Iran deal was too generous, the Cuba deal failed to address legitimate human rights concerns, the pivot to Asia was over-stated and under-resourced, and so on. As with Bush’s mixed record, there is ample room to debate both the alleged successes and failures, and to disagree on what it means on balance for each President’s legacy. We have recorded our own divergent perspectives on this debate, and on many of the issues discussed in this section, in Hal Brands, ‘Barack Obama and the Dilemmas of American Grand Strategy’, The Washington Quarterly 39/4 (Winter 2017), 101–25; and Peter Feaver, review of ‘Obama’s World: Judging His Foreign Policy Record’, in H-Diplo-International Security Studies Forum, 3 Jun. 2016, <https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/127456/issf-forum-14-%E2%80%9Cobama%E2%80%99s-world-judging-his-foreign-policy-record%E2%80%9D#_Toc452291517>.
123 Gallup, ‘George W. Bush and Barack Obama Both Popular in Retirement’, 19 Jun. 2017, <http://www.gallup.com/poll/212633/george-bush-barack-obama-popular-retirement.aspx>.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hal Brands
Hal Brands is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His recent books include Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (2016) and American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018).
Peter Feaver
Peter Feaver is professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University, and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. He is the author of several books on civil-military relations and decisions on the use of force and served as a National Security Council official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.