From IBD:
Posted 7/10/2006
Foreign Affairs: Has the Bush administration implicitly acknowledged the failure of its simplistic "cowboy diplomacy"? Time magazine thinks so, but don't take a cover story as gospel.
The granddaddy of newsweeklies revels in its pronouncement that, after six years, President Bush's foreign policy has been stampeded into dust by multiple, uncontrollable global crises. This week's cover art even recalls the old Texas gibe about "all hat and no cattle."
Time's editorial theologians build their case predictably: "A grinding and unpopular war in Iraq, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, an impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, brewing war between Israel and the Palestinians — the litany of global crises would test the fortitude of any president."
There's a bit of schadenfreude and much faux sympathy in such journalistic stage-setting. Time's editors long ago abandoned the "American Century" vision of the magazine's founder, Henry Luce, who proposed a U.S. foreign policy that evangelized for democracy and freedom — which, like Bush's, too easily has been belittled by aspiring cosmopolitans as a schoolboy's "cowboy" fantasy.
Here's the mistake of these would-be sophisticates, itself touching in its simplistic misreading of history: They imagine "cowboy" to be a pejorative word, a caricature of a trigger-happy loner.
It's not. The word springs not only from America's best sensibilities but also from its inescapable world position. The U.S. remains the indispensable nation, the font of liberty and democracy.
Where Bush critics see a disastrous "go it alone" approach, wiser heads understand the need to assert leadership. And it is a canard that the administration has forsaken "coalition-building," that touchstone of liberal foreign policy. In Iraq specifically, the U.S. has led a multinational coalition, citing resolutions the United Nations enacted but showed no stomach for enforcing.
If there's an iconic moment in the legend of the West, it's when Gary Cooper, as the marshal in "High Noon," fails to rally the townspeople as they await the arrival of a murderous gang. Only when the lawman acts "unilaterally" do the citizens overcome their cowardice and restore the peace.
Dismiss that successful saga as a screenwriter's fantasy if you wish, but it fairly resembles this administration's leadership over many of the world's townspeople. More to the point, the Bush Doctrine simply hasn't failed, as Time's editors prematurely believe.
A long slog does not mean failure, even if journalistic rustlers rush to brand it as such in the administration's rawhide. A rattlesnake may spook a horse, the chuck wagon might bust a spoke, but that doesn't mean the drive can't be completed.
No terrorist strikes have hit our soil since 9-11. The Taliban, though trying a comeback, was ousted in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein is not slaughtering hundreds of thousands and he's no longer funding terrorists, his regime replaced by a legitimate state.
Bellicosity from North Korea, which Bush identified as part of an "axis of evil" shortly after 9-11, has persuaded Japan to seek a "cowboy" posture on our model. In 2003, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, as assistant defense secretary, quietly initiated a 13-nation program to keep missile propellants out of Pyongyang's hands.
The successful covert program also denied Kim Jong-Il revenues from ballistic missile sales and blocked China from selling deadly chemicals to its little communist brother. Time magazine missed that story. You had to go to the Times of London to find it.
Cowboy diplomacy? Let's have more of it.
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