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By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

Whatever their other successes or failures on the world stage, U.S. presidents are also judged in large measure by their handling of "great-power" relations. Richard Nixon took years to fulfill his promise to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, for instance, but is still widely praised for his strategic outreach to China. Jimmy Carter is justly credited for his peacemaking at Camp David, but is remembered more for his weakness in the face of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan stumbled badly in Lebanon and on Iran-Contra, but will forever have stature as a leader who helped win the Cold War. In other words, presidents can lose some pawns and still escape history's opprobrium if they leave America well positioned among the kings and queens of world affairs.

That thought may explain George W. Bush's interest of late in presidential biography and the long view of history. With the United States mired in two costly and ongoing land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, confronting unrepentant rogues in North Korea and Iran, and threatened by a still dangerous global terrorist movement, Bush is flirting with a disastrous foreign-policy legacy. Largely lost in the deluge of negative news from abroad, however, are two bright spots that may gain luster in the fullness of time: improved U.S. relations with great-powers-to-be China and India.

By now it is a cliche that Bush's worldview was fundamentally reshaped by the 9/11 attacks, and indeed little about the world or the United States has seemed the same since. Yet it was an even earlier crisis and a very different kind of reaction by an untested commander-in-chief that led to one of the signature foreign-policy successes of the Bush presidency.

The collision of a Chinese fighter with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane on April 1, 2001, leading to the loss of the Chinese pilot and the unscheduled landing of the EP-3 aircraft on the Chinese island of Hainan, precipitated the first foreign-policy crisis of Bush's young presidency. Beijing initially refused to return the Navy crew, playing into the hands of neoconservatives high in the Bush administration who had an ideological predisposition to view China as an antagonist and a growing threat. Already the Bush administration had started referring to China as a "strategic competitor," and early on in his administration, Bush reversed nearly three decades of diplomatic ambiguity by publicly suggesting that the U.S. would use its full military might to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

Faced with this first serious foreign-policy test, however, Bush followed his instincts and sided with traditionalists in the State Department led by Secretary Colin Powell, who argued that a diplomatic solution to the crisis that did not inflict lasting damage on Sino-American relations could be found.

"The divisions within the Bush administration over the EP-3 crisis and China were the same ones we saw develop later over Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which [were] essentially between neoconservatives and more-traditional internationalists," said Jeffrey Bader, director of the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center. "Only in this first case, Bush came down pretty decisively on the side of Powell and the internationalists rather than those arguing that China was an aggressive state that needed to be contained. At quite an early stage, then, the debate about the Bush administration's policy toward China was resolved."

David Shambaugh is the director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University. "I think the administration has been successful with China precisely because Bush rejected the long-held neocon view of China as an enemy, and instead built on the precedents and policies of seven previous administrations, to include Bush 41. Having said that, Bush [43] gets credit for a level of communication and institutional cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese governments that is better today than at any time since Nixon went to China."

Somewhat ironically, it was a desire to subtly "hedge" against an ascendant China turning belligerent at some future point -- coupled with the Bush administration's focus on democratization as its lodestar in the fight against global terrorism -- that led to its strategic outreach to India. When the smoke from 9/11 cleared, India suddenly emerged on the Bush administration's radar as the largest democracy in the world, and one with a population of 150 million Muslims.

Once again building on diplomatic engagement and Indian economic reforms that were begun in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, Bush significantly advanced the strategic relationship with India with the recently signed deal to transfer U.S. civilian nuclear technology to New Delhi.

"After 9/11, the Bush administration's focus on democracy and India's position as the world's largest democracy with the second-largest Muslim population of any nation, led to an undeniable convergence of interests," said Lisa Curtis, an expert on India at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "I think the Bush administration has done a pretty deft job of building better relations with India, in part as a stabilizing check on China's influence in Asia, without raising the hackles of either country, neither of which wants to be perceived as a counterweight to the other." [an error occurred while processing this directive]

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