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Re: The Next Four Years: A Political Forecast
Specific Foreign Policy Implications:
The foreign, military, and economic policies of the second GW Bush administration will likely be felt throughout the world. No region or country will be unaffected by the new administration’s pursuit of its agenda to restructure the global order in line with its sense of U.S. moral superiority and its confidence in U.S. military might. However, some of the main repercussions will probably include the following:
• The U.S. grand strategy to restructure the Middle East will remain central to U.S. foreign policy and will likely be pursued at a more rapid pace.
• Multilateralism will continue to erode both as a process and as a principle for resolving problems that threaten international security and progress. President Bush and his foreign policy advisers regard multilateral instruments of global governance mainly as a constraint to U.S. national interests, although occasionally they will opportunistically appeal to multilateral forums to endorse or support U.S. policies, especially if it serves to induce burden-sharing of U.S.-led initiatives.
• The occupation of Iraq will not lead to the democracy and freedom the White House predicts. It’s unlikely that the new Bush administration will, at least in its first two years, admit its mistakes and end its military occupation, despite heavy costs and casualties and mounting opposition at home and abroad.
• Intelligence reform will not improve U.S. intelligence operations that track real threats to U.S. national security. The leading figures in the new foreign policy team, including the president himself, will likely continue to evaluate and manage intelligence operations not in terms of their accuracy but rather in terms of their coherence with U.S. national security doctrine, their support of the needs of the military-industrial complex, and their support of the administration’s political and military agenda.
• The State Department and the CIA will become yet more subservient to both the Pentagon and the vice-president’s office. Dissenting voices will be ignored or suppressed.
• As the U.S. budget crisis deepens, the administration will reduce funding for development and humanitarian assistance abroad unless it directly furthers U.S. foreign and military policy goals.
• The global divide between the U.S. government and other nations will deepen, and the coalitions that the U.S. builds will be with nations that are either ideologically aligned (such as Italy), are driven primarily by economic opportunism (such as Japan), share a sense of an Anglo-American world order (Great Britain, Australia), can be counted on to promote the U.S. agenda regionally (such as Colombia), are repressive nations that have become new dependencies in the war on terror (such as Pakistan and Uzbekistan), or are countries that appeal to imperial or hegemonic prerogatives in their regions (such as Israel and Russia).
• Countries targeted by the Bush administration and the neoconservatives as existing or potential threats to U.S. supremacy—Iran, North Korea, and China—will likely take active steps to develop an effective deterrent capacity against military strikes, thus leading to increased weapons proliferation and reduced willingness by nations to enter into arms control agreements.
• The Bush administration will remain committed to a foreign policy of regime change effected by a combination of military, political, and economic interventionism in such countries as Cuba and Syria.
• The new Bush administration will pursue a more aggressive energy policy to secure oil supplies in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and will intensify efforts to open up areas for drilling in the United States itself, such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
• U.S. trade deficit and budget deficits (and related unsustainable dollar values) will remain problems that will undermine the U.S. global position and increasingly threaten the fragile state of the international economy. Pressure from Europe and international financial institutions for the United States to restructure its economic policies will trigger intensifying friction internationally, leading to new pressure for the U.S. government to restructure its domestic economic policies by raising taxes, cutting spending, and increasing interest rates. Although the U.S. government proclaims its commitment to unilateralism and to protecting its global hegemonic position, the second GW Bush administration will be forced to come to terms with how dependent the U.S. economy is on the capital flows of foreign investors to sustain the unprecedented debt burden accumulated by Washington.
• Although the centrality of Israel-Palestine to tensions in the Middle East will manifest its reality, the Bush administration will not back away from its support for the hardliners in Israel, unless Israelis themselves chart a new political course.
• U.S. trade officials will intensify their campaign to establish bilateral and regional trade agreements, and the U.S. government will resist all trade and investment proposals that do not serve the direct interests of U.S. corporations. The Bush administration is not an adherent to free trade philosophy but rather sees “free trade” as an instrument that usually advances the interests of Corporate America. It’s likely that the economic unilateralism of the Bush White House will undermine the process of global economic governance embodied in institutions such as the World Trade Organization and forums such as the G7-8.
• Democrats and Republicans in Congress will remain united around a bipartisan agenda of promoting an American worldview through U.S. political aid (channeled to organizations and movements by the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development), propaganda, and public diplomacy. During the second GW Bush administration, the neoconservative policy framework of “democratic globalism” will serve as it has since the early 1980s—as the glue of a bipartisan foreign policy that provides a liberal rationale for military and political interventionism around the globe.
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The Next Four Years: A Political Forecast
