Assessing the Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration.

• Author: Jones, David T.
• Position: George W. Bush

Assessing the Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration

By Stephen Hadley, National Security Adviser

http://www.csis.org/media/csis/events/090107_hadley.pdf

http://media.csis.org/csistv/?090107_hadley

As National Security Advisor (NSA), Stephen Hadley is an asterisk. Juxtaposed against NSA predecessors such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice (with the advent of Marine four-star General James Jones as his successor), Hadley casts no shadow. In five years he may be too obscure for even a trivial pursuit question. This prospective oblivion is as predictable as was his presentation to the Center for Strategic and International Studies on January 7, 2009. Hadley marched through an everything-is-coming-up-roses, make-lemonade-of-lemons tour d'horizon of U.S. foreign policy accomplishments during the Bush administration. As such, it is a marker, akin to others that President Bush laid down during the final days of his administration, that puts administration foreign policy views on record in advance of the official hardcover presidential memoirs.

Structurally, the speech opens by demolishing a variety of straw men in stating that President Bush rejected "false choices" such as realism versus idealism; unilateralism versus multilateralism; hard versus soft power; and principle versus popularity. Then, Hadley reviews current circumstances, region/continent by...