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?
Wall Street might be suffering its greatest meltdown since the Great Depression. But that won't stop the world's official striped-pants set from gathering in New York this week for their annual U.N. General Assembly.
In New York for his final U.N. General Assembly, President Bush plans to reassure them that the $700 billion bailout being negotiated with Congress is just the kind of "aggressive, decisive action" (a la White House press secretary Dana Perino) that the global markets need. He'll also take some meetings.
But the annual meet, which might be dubbed The Gab Fest of the Professional Gabbers, is really a social event. Which is perfect for Bush, who lately, as the Washington Post put it, has been saying "a round of goodbyes, one foreign leader at a time."
Usually in bed by 10 p.m., Bush has never been one for fancy entertaining. But last week he honored Ghana's President John Kufuor with a State Dinner -- only the sixth of his presidency. He threw a social dinner Saturday for Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe. And he plans a Columbus Day dinner for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Bush calls him "my amigo,") in October.
Maybe he's getting sentimental about the folks who stood by him in eight years of sometimes lonely international diplomacy.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: President Bush and Ghana President John Kufuor, right, pose for photographs with members of the Broadway cast of 'The Lion King' after a performance last week. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/EPA
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...
Some say that U.S. foreign policy under President Bush in his second term has evolved to the point that it looks much like the foreign policy put forward by Barack Obama.
Others argue that Obama has moved closer to John McCain.
Whichever it is, there may be evolving a convergence on the subject of ... convergence.
News media outlets as diverse as the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard and the U.S.-German website Across the Pond are all taking note.
To one degree or another, they found at least a smidgen of commonality in various elements of the Obama-McCain-Bush foreign policies, whether involving their response to the Georgian-Russian war, deadlines (or the "time horizon" in the Bush administration's parlance) for troop withdrawals from Iraq, high-level diplomatic negotiations with Iran and North Korea, or the need, as the Washington Post wrote, "to shift troops and other resources from Iraq to Afghanistan."
Here, in summary, is what they found:
The Washington Post noted "an Obama presidency might look a bit like Bush's second."
On a range of major foreign policy issues over the past year, Bush has pursued strategies and actions very much along the lines of what Sen. Obama has advocated during his presidential race, according to the Illinois Democrat's campaign and many diplomatic and security experts.
The conservative Weekly Standard observed that in the days after the Russian-Georgian clash last month, Obama "began to sound more like ... McCain."
Every so often he would emerge from his vacation digs in Hawaii and ratchet up the rhetoric.
And Across the Pond found that it was Bush who was coming to sound something like Obama:
On Iraq, on meeting with controversial foreign leaders, and most recently, on conducting operations inside Pakistan without its permission to go after Al Qaeda.
--James Gerstenzang
Photo of President Bush and President John Kufuor of Ghana, today at the White House: Carol T. Powers / Bloomberg News
In the next few weeks, look for the White House to make the case that the Bush presidency has been a model of multi-lateralism in foreign policy.
Contrary to the president's image as a go-it-alone cowboy on foreign policy, the administration plans to use the upcoming United Nations General Assembly to highlight how often George W. Bush reached out to other nations in pursuit of shared diplomatic goals. In a statement, the White House said:
All of the president's events will stress the importance of effective multi-lateral action in promoting freedom and democratic governance, addressing terrorism and reducing barriers to international trade and investment.
Remember Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dismissing France and Germany as "old Europe" when they refused to join the invasion of Iraq? One administration official, talking to the Wall Street Journal, said that claiming the U.S. went to war by itself just because France and Germany didn't support the effort is "insulting to all the other countries that participated."
Bush -- who once taunted terrorists by saying "Bring 'em on" -- plans a thank-you reception for countries that contributed troops and funds to the Iraq war while in New York for the annual U.N. events Sept. 22-24. Ditto meetings with countries that signed trade pacts with the U.S.
As Countdown to Crawford reported yesterday, the White House is also intensifying efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.
Maybe the two efforts are meant to influence how history views the Bush presidency and assesses his legacy. Or maybe they are designed to undercut Democrat Barack Obama's argument that Republican John McCain represents four more years of a failed Bush policy in Iraq.
I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue.
But Thursday, speaking to a group of visiting Western experts and journalists in the resort town of Sochi, now-Prime Minister Putin suggested that Bush was not in charge of U.S. policy. "It is the court that makes the king," he said, presumably a reference to Vice President Cheney.
Putin blamed the Western media for "propagandizing" the conflict in Georgia, saying that Russia's response was temperate given Georgia's "aggression." He said that he waited several hours for a U.S. reaction and that Bush, during two meetings in Beijing where both were attending the Olympic Games, signaled that there would be no U.S. military response.
According to an account in russiaprofile.org, the two first talked at 11:30 a.m. local time Aug. 8, the day the conflict began. Putin said Bush told him: "Nobody wants a war." Then, during the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, which began at 8 p.m., they spoke again. Putin said:
It would be wrong if I tell you exactly what was said, but it became clear to me from the evening conversation that the United States had done nothing and is not willing to do anything.
Putin did have some nice things to say about Bush, calling him a man of honor and integrity. It was just some unnamed members of the Bush administration, he said, whose views had led to a deterioration in relations with Russia.
"I treat President Bush better than some Americans would," Putin joked.
And Putin suggested what may be the key to his relationship with Bush. Talking to Westerners on the seventh anniversary of 9/11, Putin urged them to better commemorate victims of the terror attacks, saying:
Back then we supported the United States. Let's not forget about this common threat to us -- terrorism.
When the war between Georgia and Russia first broke out, Democrat Barack Obama was in Hawaii, on vacation. He interrupted his holiday to issue a statement of support for Georgia. But his words were more measured -- and came later -- than either the White House response or Republican John McCain's.
But this week, Obama beat the White House by more than an hour, and McCain by two. Could it be that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, newly added to the Obama team as his running mate, has added some muscle?
The speeded-up Obama response came after Russia recognized two breakaway regions -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent countries.
In his statement, issued around 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Obama said the White House should call for a U.N. Security Council meeting to condemn Russia's action. About 45 minutes later, the White House issued a statement from President Bush, vacationing at his ranch in Crawford. He too condemned the Russian ploy, saying, "We expect Russia to live up to its international commitments."
McCain weighed in around 4 p.m. EDT, nearly two hours after Obama and more than an hour after the White House. In some ways it was the most tempered of the three statements, saying Moscow's action "deserves condemnation from the entire international community."
And, in an unexpected twist, McCain added that his wife Cindy is currently in Georgia on a humanitarian mission. "I am proud that she has traveled to that war-torn country at this time," he said.
For the 7 1/2 years of the Bush administration, Zalmay Khalilzad has been the golden boy of U.S. foreign policy.
He began life in the Bush White House as a special assistant to the president for South Asia, Near East and North African Affairs--in other words, chief of the hot spots--on the National Security Council. In short order he moved into three of the most important ambassadorial jobs: Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, the United Nations.
He was the guy to whom Bush turned when he needed someone he trusted in an extremely sensitive job.
Now, he's gone from the guy on the hot seat to bubbling in hot water.
The New York Times is reporting today that he is "facing angry questions" from his colleagues at the top of the administration over unauthorized contacts with the Pakistani political leader, Asif Ali Zardari, who is a contender to succeed Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's president.
It turns out, according to the Times, that Khalilzad had been speaking several times a week with Zardari, the widower of the assassinated opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. And he had planned the meet with Zardari next week while on vacation in Dubai, the paper reported, quoting administration officials.
Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, put an end to that plan after discovering through Zardari himself that the United States' U.N. ambassador was providing "advice and help." An angry e-mail from Boucher to Khalilzad ensued.
Such contacts would suggest an extreme violation of diplomatic protocol and U.S. policy; the administration has remained officially neutral in the contest to succeed Musharraf, and in any case diplomats are discouraged from such interference in any country's internal politics--the history of CIA involvement in instances around the world notwithstanding.
With the United States walking an extremely narrow line as it seeks to encourage a new Pakistani administration to fight the Taliban along the Afghan-Pakistan border--but not appear overly friendly with whomever takes over in Islamabad, for fear of complicating the security task--any signs of a U.S. official's meddling in Pakistani political affairs can only complicate the mission.
The Times notes an intriguing back story:
The conduct by Mr. Khalilzad, who is Afghan by birth has also raised hackles because of speculation that he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzi as president of Afghanistan.
The official State Department biography of Khalilzad makes no reference to his Afghan heritage.
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.
