When I took a quick scan of the front page of the New York Times today, I was
informed by the paper's Peter Baker that Obama's foreign policy is really not all that different from George Bush's. He starts out with the example that Hillary Clinton recently tied our responsibility and appetite for drugs to the related conflict in Mexico.
The remarks were interpreted as a departure from the previous administration, another sign of a new day in foreign policy under Mr. Obama. Forgotten in the discussion was the fact that President George W. Bush said virtually the same thing in Mexico two years ago. “The United States has a responsibility in the fight against drugs,” he said, because “when there is demand, there is supply.”
He then points out that Obama will bring to Mexico "the same American interests as his predecessor, even if they are wrapped in a different package." Further evidence of the Obama/Bush brotherhood lies in the fact that Obama favors "the same six-party talks begun under Mr. Bush in 2003, intended to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons." With regard to Iraq, Obama is of course in line with W. because his plan allows 50,000 troops to remain as of August of 2010, and Bush "signed an agreement with Baghdad before leaving office to remove all American troops by the end of 2011." Obama's Afghanistan troop buildup? According to Baker, since his predecessor had begun a "more modest buildup" and since there is broad bipartisan support for such a thing, this is indication of more Bush (because we all think of bipartisanship when we think of Bush).
Baker does point out two differences at the end: Obama's unwillingness to talk about spreading freedom worldwide in the same way that Bush did, and his willingness to engage diplomatically with so-called enemies. Of course, in painting Obama's foreign policy as the same as Bush's foreign policy with just these two exceptions is incredibly misleading.
The gotcha at the beginning of the article - Clinton's drug remarks being remarkably the same as Bush's - is hardly a gotcha. That the Bush administration and the Obama administration are both probably in favor of reducing drug abuse in this country could have been predicted by just about any educated person. It's the approach where we may find significant differences. Indeed, the Obama administration
has signaled that that "it was ready to repudiate the prohibition and 'war on drugs' approach of previous presidents, and steer policy towards prevention and "harm reduction" strategies favoured by Europe.' This is a big change! Regarding North Korea, Baker alludes to Bush's failed first-term approach in a half-assed way toward the end of the article. But this fails to underscore the big difference here - that Obama wants a multilateral approach from the beginning, while Bush steered clear of such an approach toward the beginning of his administration. It took him until his second term to realize how destructive the anti-diplomacy road can be. With Iraq, the huge difference is that Bush began an idiotic preemptive war. Just because he had an approach toward the end of his second term that is sort of similar to Obama's now doesn't erase this massive blunder, which contrasts their foreign policy (thus far) immensely.
It's difficult for me to believe that any educated person would take such an article seriously, let alone write such an article. Which leads me to believe that Baker is intentionally misleading his readers.