Was George H.W. Bush Really That Pragmatic in Foreign Affairs?
The heralded ex-president, recently deceased, made a number of blunders that set up the descent into fascism across the globe.
As a kid, and well into my adulthood, I admired George H.W. Bush. In the past decade, that view has changed considerably. A full review of his record, especially in foreign affairs, his area of declared expertise, demands a major correction of what history has said about him. From the fall of the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia’s breakup to Afghanistan to financial decisions, Bush made critical, repeated errors that led us straight down the path to where we are today.
The Soviet Union
Bush was a Cold Warrior from the Nixon house of realpolitik, and when he took over from Ronald Reagan in 1989, he left Reagan’s idealism about disarmament at the door. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, put relations with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev in the cooler while proceeding with a “review” of Soviet policy, led by those most inclined against them at the CIA (which had been making vast misjudgements about Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika for years by then). In that vacuum, Gorbachev was forced to try and continue demilitarization and the advancement of the Soviet economy into one more aimed at consumer goods. He was democratizing Soviet society in a way no other leader had dared, allowing elections to a Parliament and making the Communist Party less dominant than it ever had been. He had unilaterally began the drawdown of 500,000 Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. And yet, what did Mikhail Gorbachev get from George H.W. Bush and his foreign policy team?
Nichto. Nothing.
Bush and Baker refused economic assistance to Gorbachev. They refused to relax restrictions on the export of technology. They refused to seek an overturn of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. They refused to join Gorbachev in asking for a neutral Germany. They refused Gorbachev when he ventured to have Germany be part of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. They refused, over and over, to give Gorbachev anything of substance, and used their growing power over his declining power to beat him into submission. In the end, they provoked the collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly got themselves into a war (saved only by the incompetence of the coup plotters who overthrew Gorbachev for three days and change), and left the former republics of the USSR in disarray.
Take a look at matters: every republic outside of the Baltic states has been led by autocrats, oligarchs, and marred by gross financial mismanagement (more on that part later). Was that really a well-conducted foreign policy? Was the descent into chaos with unprotected nuclear weapons all over the former Soviet Union pragmatic and intelligent? Was it smart to let Gorbachev fall, when he was taking steps to ease the Soviet republics into democracy and freer markets, while safely deactivating nuclear weapons?
We have the Vladimir Putin we know and loathe today thanks to the Bush family. Bush peré, when negotiating the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty), didn’t even require as part of the text, despite the nearly-desperate pleas of Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a protocol to ban any eastward expansion of NATO. This had been a point of discussion through German reunification talks, and even before. The Soviets were paranoid about Germany and rightly so after having been invaded twice by them in a span of thirty years in modern times and several times before then as well. They wanted a reassurance that the West and Germany would not box them in as they had before. All Bush and Baker gave was promises that NATO wouldn’t move eastward. Helmut Kohl, chancellor of a reunified Germany, did the same.
NATO’s member nations now include Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The West did not keep its word.
As for George W. Bush, he abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 to pursue Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative despite over fifteen years of billions spent and nothing to show for it. This move infuriated Putin and convinced him we couldn’t be trusted (we’d already broken our word about NATO expansion), as a result, he rebuilt his military into a force resembling the Red Army and has used that to create chaos and inflict his will on the region. We’re now in a resumption of the Cold War, with brushfire conflicts and funding of insurgencies and new nuclear weapons being deployed. If George H.W. Bush had looked at reality, looked at all the liberalization that Mikhail Gorbachev had undertaken, and acted accordingly, we might’ve gotten a friendlier, healthier relationship with Russia, one that was better suited for democracy, not to mention republics that don’t do things like boil their political opponents in oil (Uzbekistan).
Afghanistan
When the Soviets completed their withdrawal in 1989 from Afghanistan, the United States decided to fold up shop and also leave. We’d maintained an embassy in Kabul (minus an ambassador ever since Adolph “Spike” Dubs had been kidnapped and murdered in 1979), and had funneled weapons, food, and cash to the mujaheddin fighting the Soviet Army there, determined to create the USSR’s own Vietnam War parallel. When it worked, when the Soviet Army withdrew, we bailed out and left the civil war to be fought on their own. Because we helped with destabilizing the country and did not helped to ensure its restabilization after the invasion was over, the result was a civil war lasting seven years, the installation of the Taliban, the safe haven provided for Osama bin Laden, and the impetus for the 9/11 attacks, which helped drive America into the semi-insanity that is its politics and culture today.
Good job, George Herbert Walker Bush. That whole “neglect” thing worked out really well.
Yugoslavia
Despite a Deputy Secretary of State, Laurence Eagleburger, who’d twice been ambassador in Belgrade and had numerous contacts within the nation, America sat back and watched as Yugoslavia disintegrated, allowing a fascist autocrat named Slobodan Milosevic to take over the resources of the Yugoslavian state, devote them to Serbian war aims, and nearly destroy two ethnicities over ten years. After engaging in war with Croatia, Milosevic turned his attention upon Bosnia, considered by Serbs to be holy ground, yet a region populated by a large number of Muslims. Milosevic introduced laws similar to Hitler’s laws against Jews, then escalated into outright war on the Bosnian Muslim population. America’s response, along with the West, was to impose a ban on weapons for the Bosnians, denying them any ability to defend themselves. Such actions led to the eventual siege of Sarajevo, destroying that beautiful city, the rape of Srebrenica, and the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent Bosnians.
After the West finally intervened in 1995, Bosnia was slowly safeguarded by U.S. troops after the UN had utterly failed to do a thing, even having their soldiers taken prisoner by Serbs instead of fight back because the UN refused to allow them to defend themselves or show any force that would be a deterrent. In short, when oil or geopolitical objectives were at stake, the Bush administration was happy to help out Muslims. When it was a matter of preventing another Holocaust, we shrugged and let it happen. Bush had a man with contacts that could’ve stopped it, not to mention the standing in the world after the Gulf War to give Bosnia the same help he gave Kuwait. Unfortunately for Bosnia, they didn’t have oil.
Financial decisions
This part is only as it relates to foreign affairs, and mainly has to do with, again, the Soviet Union. The Bush administration’s refusal to help the Soviet Union, allowing the deep distrust of previous decades to infuse their thinking despite real and lasting change promulgated by Gorbachev, hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a crisis that could’ve launched the nuclear war we’d spent decades fearing. In the summer of 1990, Gorbachev, fed up with Bush’s refusals, approached West German chancellor Kohl and asked for five billion Deutschmarks with which to purchase consumer goods. Kohl considered it a minor request in the scheme of things, and when the G7 summit took place in Houston later that year, he pressed the other leaders to pitch in. They refused.
In a fury at their obstinance, Kohl demanded to know how helping the Soviet Union was any different than helping China, which had backslid into repression the year before by running over protestors with tanks and shooting them in the streets, all because they wanted the same liberalizations that Gorbachev had introduced into the Soviet Union. Bush lamely said that the Soviet Union and China weren’t one and the same (in this regard, he was right, except his reasoning was the opposite of reality — the Soviets had stopped their human rights abuses and rehabilitated political prisoners, while China, as mentioned, had gone the other direction). Kohl exploded and accused his partners of treating the Soviets like they were a delegation from the Congo to be ignored (thus demonstrating the undercurrent of racism the G7 nations showed Africa after a century-plus of colonial terror). The end result, though, was Gorbachev and the Soviet Union being plunged over a cliff.
After the crash landing, Bush sent over Milton Friedman’s economist spawns from the University of Chicago, who decided to institute “shock therapy,” code words for deep, painful austerity, inflicted on a population that was already struggling badly. They used the entirety of Russia as their lab rats, and in doing so, helped create the oligarchal system that permeates that nation today. The average citizen has not seen their standard of living improve in many ways, the nation’s wealth was robbed by a select few, and they’re now, once again, our adversaries. As Strobe Talbott, Russian expert and Deputy Secretary of State for Bill Clinton, noted, it was too much shock and not enough therapy.
Had the West, and especially Bush, who, again, had plenty of money for objectives like the War on Drugs (enough so to stage a buy in Lafayette Park!), helped Gorbachev ease the economy to civilian/consumer purposes from the gigantic military arms factory it was, it’s likely that the rising tide would have lifted all boats and improved quality of life for everyone. One cannot take a nation of hundreds of millions of people and simply flip its proverbial table politically, economically and socially and expect a good result. The “pragmatic” Bush, who was so eager to help China out after the Tiananmen Square massacre, repeatedly refused the Soviets that same help. He was personally courteous to Gorbachev while politically pushing him into a corner he couldn’t escape, to the detriment of the future world.
Because of things like “shock therapy,” Russia’s descent into an oligarchal-fascist state, unnecessary expansion of NATO, deliberate ignorance of ethnic cleansing and genocide playing out in front of TV cameras, neglect of a nation we helped destroy, the entire world has become chaotic and brutal. Propaganda reigns, from Fox News in America to RT in Russia, whipping up hate and driving people apart. Liberal democracy is failing across the globe. Minorities are being held in concentration camps from China to Australia. Children are stolen from parents who only want them to grow up without being shot at in nations we destabilized through our geopolitics. Capitalism nearly destroyed the world economy in 2008, and instead of instituting democratic socialist measures to ease the pain of those affected the worst, we bailed out the greedy, rapacious bankers who caused the crash, a decision where one can draw a straight line from that moment to Donald Trump being America’s president.
All of the above can be traced to actions and decisions taken by the “pragmatic” George H.W. Bush. It wasn’t that he was an awful human being personally, a tyrant like Trump or Nicholas Madero or General Al-Sisi. Twice he took actions that were genuinely altruistic — the removal of General Manuel Noriega from Panama, freeing that nation and allowing it to become a thriving nation; and sending rescue missions to Somalia to feed a starving population in 1992 after losing his reelection bid.
Ultimately, George H.W. Bush was the embodiment of the American WASPs, who held a credo of American capitalism, American politics, and American global hegemony. It was a different version of “America First” from Trump, but it was that dedication to the WASP credo and the unwillingness to help those who had genuinely reformed, and those who were devolving into chaos that we helped sow, that created the inexorable path we took all the way to our world today.
