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Obama, Bush and America’s Limits

The release of George W. Bushs memoirs and his successors ten-day trip to Asia complemented each other in a sobering way this last week. Bushs book, Decision Points, brought back the folly of his early unilateralism. At the same time, President Barack Obamas troubled Asia trip showed the limits of Americas influence even when it tries to work with others.
If there was one philosophy that dominated the Bush administrations early years it was the notion that the best way to preserve American power was to exercise it unilaterally. The more constraints the U.S. voluntarily acquiesced to, the OBDIIF to Open weaker it would become, and by bucking international institutions and even abrogating existing treaties, America would strengthen our position. The prime advocates of this approach Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and John Bolton were effectively arguing that might made right.
(See pictures of Obama s trip to Asia.)
Plenty of American foreign policy experts disagreed, usually less on moral grounds than on practical ones: by shaping international institutions to our liking while we had the power, the multilateralists argued, we would ensure they served our interests when we were less influential. But back then it was hazardous for politicians to make that argument. The Romans, the Turks and the British may have eventually faded (none of them, incidentally, thanks to too much international cooperation), but any suggestion that The usa might not be number one forever was taken as passive acceptance of that fate (see, for example, Howard Deans politically ill-considered 2003 primary campaign assertion that, We wont always odometer correction tool have the strongest military).
Now the idea that we wont be number one forever is more widely credited. One of the most-discussed ads of this last election cycle showed a fully risen China looking back in 20 years and laughing at our decline. A post-midterms CBS poll showed 62% of the country thinks its