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?
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
The verdict has been in for nearly two years: The American population does not approve of the way President Bush has done his job. His approval rating has been below 40% for nearly two years, and has, of late, hovered around 30%.
Along comes Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek, with this counterintuitive idea: The widespread criticism under which the president has labored month after month "misses an important reality."
The criticism has come from all over, he notes: "Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone." But it has been directed at an administration that is not the one running things now.
The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed.
As a result, he notes, the administration has put in place foreign policies that "are more sensible, moderate and mainstream."
It took a long time, but the turnaround in our policy in Iraq has been significant. The United States has made broad overtures to the Sunni community, and now actively supports Sunni fighters it had once jailed. We've concentrated on stabilizing Shiite neighborhoods, helping to free them from dependence on militias.
President Bush is gone from the White House. But he'll be back.
He has embarked on a 12-day journey that is taking him from Washington to West Virginia to Kennebunkport, Maine, and then, after an overnight respite at Camp David, on to Asia -- where he's got his hands full with sticky diplomatic situations.
In Seoul, the focus is northward -- on the continuing efforts to tame North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In Bangkok, the pressing issue is Myanmar. And while the purpose of the president's visit to smoggy Beijing is ostensibly to attend the opening of the Summer Olympic Games and cheer for U.S. athletes, questions about China's handling of human rights issues will undergird everything he does there.
When first we heard that term, it was ringing in President Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address -- a phrase that summed up the good guys-bad guys division of the president's no-shades-of-gray worldview. Evoking the Allies and Axis of World War II, it put Iraq, Iran and North Korea on the side of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
Iraq? Wherever it is going, it is no longer part of any axis -- though it is clearly at the moment in the United States' orbit.
Iran? With the talks this weekend in Geneva, in which Under secretary of State William J. Burns (left, walking in Geneva) met with an Iranian official, the United States is showing a willingness to ignore its prohibition on sitting down with Iranian representatives before Tehran suspends enrichment of uranium. Iran enriches, and the United States is talking.
And along comes North Korea: No senior official had met with representatives of the Pyongyang regime since Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright conferred with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is planning to meet with her North Korean counterpart, Pak Ui-chun, this week in Singapore.
What's going on here?
To be sure, White House officials continue to present Iran and North Korea in a very dark light.
As Helene Cooper reports in The New York Times: "The Bush administration began long ago to step down from its vow not to talk to America's foes."
"But," she adds, "its recent concessions to Iran and North Korea -- and to Iraq, another charter member of the axis -- have further muddled the old message."
North Korea says it plans to blow up the cooling tower of its Yongbyon nuclear plant, the one used to produce plutonium to build atomic bombs, possibly as early as Friday.
That highly dramatic, televised act would speak to the North Koreans’ commitment to stop building nuclear weapons, the culmination of 17 months of intensive Bush administration diplomatic efforts.
You can see where all this potentially points. Cable news would run endless slo-mo of the crumbling cooling tower as b-roll to Bush’s proclamation that his administration succeeded in heading off one of the leading threats to world peace. For Bush, it would be a rare foreign policy victory. It could even stand as a top legacy of his administration.
But it may be too soon to unfurl the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
First, much of this may not come to pass. After all, it depends on the notoriously unpredictable North Korean regime. Second, if it did, its true meaning and value may not be known for months or years.
The background: In a speech at the Heritage Foundation June 18, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began elevating expectations of progress in long-stalled "six-party" de-nuclearization talks between the U.S., North and South Korea, Russia, China and Japan. Very soon, she said, the North Koreans would provide a formal declaration about its nuclear stockpile that U.S. officials expected to see as long ago as last December. The White House said the declaration could be given to the Chinese, who chair the six-party talks, as early as today.
At the same time, North Korea has begun issuing invitations to its planned destruction of the cooling tower at Yongbyon, which was idled as a result of the six-party talks.
If it all happens as scripted, the Bush administration would move to take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism and start easing U.S. sanctions.
Many conservatives angrily oppose this strategy, believing North Korea can’t be trusted. Many liberals have openly expressed smugness, believing Bush was wrong seven years ago to upend a deal worked out between the Clinton administration and North Korea.
Meanwhile, the definition of success grows smaller as it grows nearer.
The expected North Korean declaration probably won’t deal with two big Bush administration concerns: That Pyongyang has operated a secret uranium enrichment program, in addition to its plutonium program; and that North Korea helped build the alleged Syrian nuclear plant that was bombed last September by Israel.
The Bush administration hopes to leave town next year buoyed by a diplomatic success on one of the toughest national security issues it faces: Dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program.
But as the State Department team edges ahead, conservatives are warning--ever more loudly--that they may not give Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the grade she expects. Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, writes in a recent edition of National Review Online that Rice and her chief Asia diplomat, Chris Hill, “seem bent on colluding with Pyongyang to accomplish yet another phony ‘denuclearization deal’--and thus clear the way for the US to 'fulfill its commitments' by removing North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terror list.”
--Paul Richter
AP Photo of President Bush and Secretary Rice by Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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.
The Bush administration hopes to leave town next year buoyed by a diplomatic success on one of the toughest national security issues it faces: Dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program.
