Roughly 75 years ago, a Canadian colonel drew up what was known as Defense Scheme No. 1, a bizarre plan intended to rebuff a U.S. invasion from the south by seizing Albany, N.Y., and Minot, N.D.
Now, of course, the United States and Canada maintain what they happily refer to as the longest undefended international border in the world, and President Bush couldn't have a better friend on the international scene than Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Trade issues between the two are at a minimum, and Canada couldn't be more supportive of the war in Afghanistan, regularly supplying troops to the mission under the NATO umbrella.
But Bush may not be feeling too kindly toward Harper this weekend.
The Conservative leader, in a national political debate Thursday evening, declared in no uncertain terms that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake.
"It was absolutely an error," he said under pressure from debate opponents. "It's obviously clear the evaluation of weapons of mass destruction proved not to be correct. That's absolutely true and that's why we're not sending anybody to Iraq."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Tom Hanson / Associated Press/The Canadian Press
We'll start with the obvious: There is only one president, and it is George W. Bush. Until noon on Jan. 20, 2009, he will hold the full range of legal powers of the nation's chief executive.
But one need only look a few feet from the Oval Office this afternoon for evidence that almost four months from the inauguration of his successor, his political authority is being diluted.
To be sure, the president is busy with the duties of his office. Just consider his schedule today:
By early afternoon, he had already met with the president of Lebanon...
and the president of the Palestinian Authority...
He met with the leadership of the Orthodox Union, a 110-year-old Jewish group...
He signed one of the major bills to come out of the final days of the current congressional session --amendments to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, which was one of the major domestic policy achievements of his father, President George H. W. Bush (far left in the photo below)...
And later in the day he is meeting with the prime minister of India.
And right now, to push forward the tentative agreement on his proposal to bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion -- and, he argues, to improve the financial picture on Main Street -- he is meeting with House and Senate Democratic and Republican leaders.
And two others are joining the conference in the Cabinet Room, next door to the Oval Office: Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.
Had the economic crisis occurred perhaps three months ago, there is little chance they'd have found seats at the polished oblong table.
But their presence today is a recognition of the ebbing of Bush's political clout -- and the fact that if they are on board, whatever agreement emerges will have a far better chance of passage.
The presidential campaign, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said at her daily news briefing today, "was starting to seep into the debate."
"The thought was that bringing these two candidates together would actually help finalize the framework that we were closing in on, and we think that that's all for the better."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photos: President Bush with President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Credit: Matthew Cavanaugh / EPA. President Bush with leaders of the Orthodox Union and signing the amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press.
The setting was familiar--the rostrum backed by the massive green marble. So, too, the message.
President Bush was speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, giving his valedictory address. And in tenor and content, it could have been the introductory speech he delivered in a meeting delayed as New York, and the world, recovered from the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Delivering a message of preemption, Bush told the U.N. today:
But, if one sentence in his address--delivered with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran looking on--summarized Bush's message after eight years of occasionally rocky relations with the world body, it was this:
The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever.
Was this the same President Bush, then, who made it clear in his 2002 address that the United States was headed toward a showdown with Saddam Hussein. And that while Washington would appreciate U.N. support, the mission would go forward regardless?
President Bush has not always had the best of relations with the United Nations. He is, after all, the president who dispatched John R. Bolton as his ambassador there. The envoy did little to disguise his distaste from time to time with the "multilateral" approach.
Six months before the United States invaded Iraq, the president went to New York to tell the U.N. how much he respected the organization — but he'd put Saddam Hussein in his place with or without U.N. approval.
So here comes the president making his farewell address to the world body on Tuesday.
He will focus on how the United Nations and other multinational organizations can be improved to meet current challenges, said Stephen J. Hadley, the president's national security advisor, in a preview of the speech that sounds something like an eight-year report card, with some check marks for "needs improvement."
"He believes," Hadley said in an interview with a small group of reporters, that the United Nations "has an important role to play in meeting the challenges of this new century," along with NATO, the European Union and other multinational organizations.
But Bush will also say that the U.N. needs to do better at confronting the challenges facing the world today, according to the senior aide. Among the president's complaints: The world body has been "glacially slow" in placing peacekeepers in Sudan.
Look, also, for reminders from the president directed at Russia to adhere to the commitments it made in the wake of the crisis in Georgia. Bush will be directing that message at Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Neither President Dmitri Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin are expected to attend, Hadley said.
As for the U.N. and other such organizations, Hadley said the president would recommend "that we need to have an attitude of partnership, not patronizing; that you want to partner with governments that are making the right decisions for their people — that are governing justly, investing in their people, understand the power of markets to lift people out of poverty."
For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.
As the president's national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.
He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.
If the word "crisis" was attached to it -- save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina -- it is only a slight exaggeration to say there's a good chance the debate went through Hadley's office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.
The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.
Bush, Hadley said today, is "remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself."
He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office.
He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.
"Situations change," Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was "a very different place" these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.
Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.
Hadley put it this way: "We've tried to be flexible. We've tried to learn."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Stephen J. Hadley, left rear next to Vice President Dick Cheney, in the White House Roosevelt Room, 2006. Credit: Eric Draper / The White House
President Bush will spend the first days of next week in New York City, attending the opening session of the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. The speech on Tuesday--his eighth to the world body--will provide an opportunity for him to address the role of multinational organizations in evolving world diplomacy.
He's managing to squeeze in a Republican fundraising stop in New Jersey on his way to the city--and another one, in Florida, on the way back to Washington. New York to Washington, via Florida? That's politics.
On the sidelines, there will be a meeting with the new president of Pakistan and then, later in the week in Washington, he will meet separately with the president of the Palestinian Authority and the president of Lebanon.
For the president's public schedule, click on Read Full Story...
It's one of those rare sights at the White House: President Bush in black tie.
Look for it Monday evening, when he is the host at a state dinner for the president of Ghana, John Kufuor. His distaste for formal occasions notwithstanding, a state dinner is the least Bush could do for the African president.
When Bush visited Kufuor last February in Accra, his host told him that he would complete a major highway from the Accra airport into the capital city -- and it would be named after George W. Bush.
The entertainment on Monday evening after the dinner will be provided by the cast of, what else, "The Lion King."
For the rest of the president's upcoming public schedule provided by the White House, click on Read Full Story...
They may not have solved all the world’s problems, but no one can say the senior diplomats in the Bush administration’s State Department haven’t put serious effort into joining the Internet age.
Photos galore, personal observations--all on the record, from people more often identified as "senior administration officials traveling with the secretary."
In August, in the middle of an ominous standoff with Russia, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried took time out to punch out a 600-word defense of U.S. diplomacy on the Georgia crisis in Dipnote, the State Department’s blog.
Last Saturday, the State Department’s chief spokesman, Sean McCormack (looking very un-bloggy beside the secretary in the photo above) gave a blow-by-blow of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’sslightly surreal encounter in Tripoli with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, only minutes after it happened.
Key insight: “Brother leader” doesn’t receive visitors on plastic lawn chairs, as previously reported.
It has been more than half a century -- 55 years, to be exact -- since a U.S. secretary of state has visited Libya.
But with an evening meal in a Bedouin tent today, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi welcomed Condoleezza Rice -- whom he called last year "my darling black African woman." Presumably, he wouldn't have been quite so gushing toward John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of state who visited in 1953.
In an interview with the Arabic TV network Al Jazeera, CNN notes, he called her "Leeza," and said: "I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders."
The dinner signaled that the United States and Libya had moved beyond nearly three decades of animosity to put the U.S.-Libyan relationship on a normal, if not entirely friendly, footing.
The session ended a five-year rehabilitation in which Libya gave up its weapons of mass destruction and then settled claims against it for past terrorist acts, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.
The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter, traveling with Rice, reports that the Bush administration considers Libya’s reform one of its top foreign policy achievements, and a model for other adversary states, such as Iran. Earlier today, in Portugal, Rice called the meeting “a historic moment.”
Yet officials on both sides say they aspire to a neutral relationship rather than a warm one, and in recent days there have been reminders of the mistrust that still hangs over the relationship like a dusty Saharan haze.
If anyone thought the mercurial Kadafi was getting mushy, note that on Libyan television in an address to the nation on Monday, he said it was “not necessary for us to be friends with America." He classified the two countries as “neither friends nor enemies.”
And his son and possible heir, Seif Islam, told the BBC in an interview broadcast Sunday that while Libya had acknowledged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, it accepted blame only to get rid of international sanctions against the country.
“We played with words ... it doesn’t mean we did it in fact,” he said of the bombing.
It became the mantra of President Bush's conduct of foreign policy.
Now, the United States' relationship with Russia looks much as it did just before the Cold War ended and the president's father was campaigning for the White House two decades ago. The Saudis continue to go their own way when it comes to pumping oil. And China took over the world stage during the Summer Olympics just concluded — without yielding on its strong-arm human rights practices.
Never mind the tete-a-tetes that Bush conducted at his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine, with Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, the Saudi royalty visit to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, and the distance Bush traveled to demonstrate a friendship with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Michael Abramowitz, writing in today's Washington Post, took a look at the president's reliance on stepping beyond the bounds of formal diplomacy and found that it didn't quite accomplish as much as Bush may have hoped.
He writes: "Many Russia experts say Bush did not understand the true intentions and character of the Russian leader."
But, he notes, White House officials present Bush as being "aggressive but realistic" in how he approaches world leaders.
He quotes Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, who said:
While there are often policy issues that don't exactly go the way we want them to, the situation on the other hand could be much worse if the president did not have a decent working relationship with some of these leaders.
— James Gerstenzang
Photo: Former U.S. President Bush poses with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and current U.S. President Bush. Credit: Sergei Chirikov / EPA
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
Roughly 75 years ago, a Canadian colonel drew up what was known as Defense Scheme No. 1, a bizarre plan intended to rebuff a U.S. invasion from the south by seizing Albany, N.Y., and Minot, N.D.
