Ask the Author: David Frum

Q: Labeling U.S. foreign policy over the past eight years as the George W. Bush foreign policy seems like a misnomer. Many influential members of his inner circle collaborated to craft what you call Bushs Legacy. Policy on Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and, most importantly, Iraq seemed to have been dominated by inner-circle neoconservatives and to a lesser extent the military, while policy on China, for example, was strongly influenced by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. How did the strong personalities in the Bush administrationfrom Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice to Donald Rumsfeldinfluence the Bush Legacy?

David Frum: Well yes, that is always true of any administration. There will be much fruitful work for biographers and historians disentangling who exactly did what. Let me suggest one thought that should be kept in mind, however: Many of these strong personalities had a strange way of going passive at crucial moments. One rises in Washington as much by avoiding blame for failure as by gaining credit for successand the best way to avoid blame is to stake out an ambiguous position that allows one later to claim to have been right all along. Many of the leading figures in the Bush years were masters of this technique.

Q: Many claim that Iraqs magnitude distracted Bush from problems at homehe failed to upgrade infrastructure, provide a solution to the growing health insurance crisis, rethink Social Security, and ultimately reform the financial system. Do you believe that, while financially and physically distracted in Iraq, the United States squandered an irrecoverable opportunity to lay the political, legal, social, and economic groundwork necessary for the next presidents success in a multipolar world?

DF: I have often written that I dont believe that George W. Bush ever had a well-considered domestic agenda. So in that sense, no, Iraq did not distract him. More urgently: Success in Iraq is a crucial part of building a better groundwork for world order. The Persian Gulf is obviously a hugely strategic part of the world. Replacing a reckless, brutal, and WMD-seeking dictatorship with a representative government, defeating an Islamist insurgency in the heart of the Islamic world, and liberating Iraq to rejoin the world marketthese will be large events, with large consequences.

Q: You argue that The U.S. homeland has enjoyed almost complete immunity from acts of international terrorism during Bushs term. Although this is certainly true, I have been disturbed by the fast-growing number of attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it seems that the Taliban and al Qaeda are staging a comeback. Generals in the military have recently sounded the alarm that we may lose the fight if urgent measures are not taken to increase troops and resources. Hasnt attention in Iraq tied our hands in dealing with this other front in the war on terror?

DF: To some extent, yes. As a matter of interest, I am writing these answers at the Dutch and Australian military base in Uruzgan province, Afghanistanand I have witnessed here some of the consequences of U.S. and allied underinvestment in this country in the 2002-06 period. That said, the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Iraq are already proving hugely useful in organizing the new NATO strategy to quell the insurgency here.

Q: You mention new bilateral trade agreements as one of the positive foreign-policy legacies of the Bush administration, yet as the economy has shown weakness, the mood in recent months has turned against opening U.S. borders. Did President Bush fail to convince the American public of what he perceived to be the value of free trade? How long will it take for such trade agreements to be appreciated?

DF: The mood in the United States has been turning against open trade for almost half a decadevictim, I think, of the stagnation of the wages of ordinary workers during the Bush years. I wrote a defense of the Bush foreign policy, not the Bush domestic policy. Even before the mortgage meltdown, Americans were feeling anxious about their living standards, and politicians of course exploit those anxieties, as Barack Obama, for example, did with his attacks on NAFTA during the Ohio primary.

Q: The United States has struggled to persuade other NATO countries to take on serious commitments in manning the mission in Afghanistan, as you point out. After the Bush years, will NATO continue to be a viable military alliance, capable of true consensus?

DF: If NATO was in trouble, Vladimir Putin has saved it. The Russian invasion of Georgia reminded the nations of Eastern and Central Europe why they need NATO and they in turn will be raising powerful and effective voices inside the councils of Europe.

Q: I hoped in your discussion of the Bush administrations foreign policy that you would address the impact that controversies over torture, Guantnamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib have had on U.S. influence and credibility on the international stage. Have these scandals shattered the international image of America as a beacon of freedom?

DF: Scandals always hurt. Communications are an essential part of modern war, and Abu Ghraib may well be regarded as more strategically costly than a lost battle.

More broadly: Obviously the administration made many mistakes as well. These have not exactly gone undocumented, and they were not my topic. That said, I do think that the failure to work with Congress in 2002 to pass a statute governing the treatment of terrorist detainees was a serious mistake. I thought so at the time and wrote so soon after I left government.

U.S. courts typically allow the U.S. government a certain limited period of time to win its wars without second-guessing. Thus the Supreme Court handed down its important decision overturning some of President Abraham Lincolns Civil War actions in 1866, the year after the war ended!

The courts were not going to allow the U.S. government to operate an executive-branch legal and prison system forever. They began signaling discontent in 2005, before finally overturning the whole system this year. This was predictable and should therefore have been predicted.

Q: The Bush administration failed to anticipate the costs of the Iraq war in its initial combat estimates, which were hundreds of billions of dollars less than the current price tag. Was this justified in light of the current economic crisis? What effect did it have on the progress and stability of the American economy?

DF: The war was and is expensive. Still, Afghanistan and Iraq together will cost much less than either the Bush administrations prescription drug benefit or the mortgage bailout resulting from federal acquiescence on too-easy lending standards. The cost of Iraq alone may add as much as $1 trillion to the federal debt. The federal assumption of responsibility for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: $6 trillion. If you are looking for culprits for the United States current financial troubles, those domestic decisions should head the list.

Q: With both presidential candidates distancing themselves from the Bush administration, why are you confident that many of Bushs foreign policies will go unchanged under the next president?

DF: Barack Obama and John McCain are both committed to intensifying the U.S. role in Afghanistan. Obama is visibly retreating from his previous positions on Iraq: He now describes the surge as a successand I doubt very much that he will wish to incur the blame for turning success into failure. The India relationship will surely continue to be nurtured under the next president as it was under both Bill Clinton and Bush, ditto the policy of refusing to be drawn into a confrontation with Venezuela. True, Barack Obama has surrounded himself with many who dislike the Bush administrations rhetorical emphasis on democracy. But on this most controversial issue, it is George W. Bush who is in line with the U.S. foreign-policy traditionand traditions are very hard to escape.

David Frum, a former speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (New York: Doubleday, 2007).