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A place in history can be foreign

Like it or not, a president's legacy often rests on foreign policy wins and losses.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published August 13, 2006

Now that he's 60 and in his final term in office, George Bush undoubtedly is thinking about his place in history. But a president whose original agenda was almost entirely domestic faces a reality: Presidents are often judged by their success - or failures - in foreign affairs.

On that score, Bush's legacy may be less lustrous than he had hoped.

Iran and North Korea are taunting the world with their nuclear ambitions. The Mideast faces its worst crisis in decades. Iraq is slipping ever closer to civil war. And as shown by the foiled plot to blow up U.S.-bound passenger jets, Islamist extremism remains a grave threat.

So far, the results of Bush's war on terror are "not positive," one scholar says, but the president certainly wouldn't be the first U.S. leader torpedoed by world events.

"There are really important presidents whose legacy has been gobbled up and devoured by what were perceived as foreign policy failures," says George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M University and editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly.

"There are lot of things to remember Woodrow Wilson for, but the first thing people remember is the League of Nations and its failure. And Lyndon Johnson was tremendously important when you think of civil rights, Medicare and federal aid to education. Those were huge, important polices, but people can't get past Vietnam."

Conversely, a president's reputation can be burnished by his handling of foreign affairs.

Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt near the end of World War II, was not particularly popular during much of his time in office. But his stature later soared because of his role in ending that war as well as in containing the spread of communism.

"Now we revere Truman almost entirely because of his foreign policies," Edwards says. "He laid the foundation for the successful prosecution of the Cold War."

And these certainly aren't the only leaders whose legacies were greatly affected by their foreign policy record.

Though Richard Nixon is forever tarnished by Watergate, he also opened the door to China, ended the Vietnam War and started strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union.

"With a bit of historical time, people are looking at Nixon's foreign policy achievements and giving him credit," says James Pfiffner, an expert on the presidency at George Mason University.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, continues to be perceived as a weak president largely because of the 1979 crisis in which a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans hostage for 444 days. Less well-known, but equally significant, was the Carter administration's support for Islamic rebels fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

"That's where Osama bin Laden got a lot of training and U.S. money," Pfiffner says. "Those things come back to bite us."

The Reagan administration also had its share of foreign policy disasters, notably the Iran-Contra scandal and the 1983 pullout from Lebanon after 241 U.S. soldiers died in a bombing.

But while Carter was widely viewed as a wimp, the decisive, charismatic Reagan was and still is seen as a strong leader both domestically and internationally. Admirers say he caused the fall of the Soviet Union by threatening to outspend it militarily and by his dramatic demand to "tear down this wall" in Berlin.

"I think the Soviet Union was falling apart anyway, but Reagan helped facilitate it," Pfiffner says.

The collapse of what Reagan dubbed the "evil empire" actually came during the term of the first President Bush. Though voters turned him out of office, many historians praise Bush for skillfully managing the end of the Cold War - and for resisting the impulse to go into Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War.

In what turned out to be a legitimate concern, "there was a fear that we'd be bogged down for a very long time," Pfiffner says.

Unlike his father, a former CIA director with vast foreign policy experience, the younger Bush campaigned heavily on domestic issues and restoring "moral integrity" to the White House after the scandals of the Clinton years.

In 2000, "he didn't say a whole lot about foreign policy and if he said anything, he was talking about a retreat," notes Sidney Milkis, a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia.

"It's fair to say no one would have expected Bush to be a war president, yet his presidency after 9/11 has been consumed by the war on terror, particularly since it's been prosecuted with such controversy."

Historians and the public generally agree the United States was justified in invading Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban government, which had sheltered bin Laden and others responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

The invasion of Iraq, however, is increasingly seen as an unnecessary "war of choice" that has killed nearly 2,600 American troops and countless Iraqis, turned the country into a new breeding ground for terrorists and stoked, not dampened, Islamic extremism worldwide.

Moreover, experts say, the administration has become so bogged down in Iraq that it has weakened its ability to deal with the nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea or mediate the crisis between Israel and the radical Lebanese group Hezbollah.

"The long-term consequences of (Iraq) are incalculable," Pfiffner says.

The Iraq war has divided Americans along partisan lines, with 81 percent of Democrats saying it was not worth fighting compared to just 24 percent of Republicans, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.

"In the short term, Bush has certainly benefitted (from Republican support), but whether his foreign policy will survive the way he's tied it to partisanship is something else," says Milkis, the University of Virginia professor.

"For better and worse, he has really fostered a partisan debate about the role the United States should play abroad. It has become a national debate that is going to affect almost every race in the 2006 election - we can see that clearly in the Lieberman primary."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who supports the war, was defeated Tuesday by a fellow Democrat running on an antiwar platform.

Scholars warn that it is impossible to judge a president's legacy before he even leaves office. Iraq could yet become a peaceful, model democracy and Bush, like Truman, could soar in history's eyes.

Bush "is certainly an interesting president," says Stephen Hess, an expert on American politics at the Brookings Institution.

"Unfortunately, he's an interesting president who by this time is much loved or much hated. For somebody who was going to bring us together, that hasn't been part of his legacy, that's for sure."

Susan Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 13, 2006, 05:50:29]