Hold That Rush To Judgment.(George W. Bush's foreign policy)(Brief Article)

"In the end the United States may find that it has done its cause, its friends and its own true interests little good."

"I have nothing against the U.S. president's right to leadership. But one must know in which direction it is going."

"The American president is a "cowboy who divides the world into good guys and bad guys."

Reactions from abroad to George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech--right? Not exactly. The first quote is from the Manchester Guardian, commenting on John F. Kennedy's speech during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which included the announcement of a naval quarantine of the island nation and the declaration that any missile launched from it would be seen as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States. The second quote is one of the many complaints German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lodged against Jimmy Carter. And the third is an Izvestia attack on Ronald Reagan, not at the beginning of his first term but in 1988, during his final year in office.

The fact that so many of those judgments could easily pass for today's backlash to Bush's speech doesn't automatically discredit them. Nor does the fact that many of those judgments about previous U.S. presidents were radically revised, or completely reversed, later. After all, some--like Schmidt's carping about Carter--proved pretty close to the mark.

But at the very least, today's foreign critics of Bush should consider whether they aren't making a rush to judgment by repeating, sometimes in almost exactly the same words, their often erroneous assessments of his predecessors. Was Kennedy wrong in taking the world to the brink of nuclear war to force Nikita Khrushchev to pull his missiles out of Cuba? Was Reagan wrong in ratcheting up the pressure on "the evil empire," thus hastening its collapse? Today most people would consider those purely rhetorical questions--with good reason.

U.S. presidents often find themselves in a damned-if-they-don't, damned-if-they-do position. If they fail to act decisively on the world stage, they are accused of shirking their responsibilities, of failing to lead. If they stride forcefully into the international arena, they are accused of superpower arrogance. In the Middle East, Bill Clinton was widely ridiculed for his micromanagement of the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians as he was preparing to leave office. Yet within a couple of months the same critics were loudly complaining that Bush was dangerously ...