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Interview: Bush Administration 'Drained and Lessened' American Power in World

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Leslie H. Gelb, President Emeritus, CFR
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

December 19, 2008

Leslie H. Gelb, a former high-ranking national security official and newspaper editor who served ten years as CFR's president, says the Bush administration "drained and lessened American power in the world," and as a result U.S. credibility in the world "was sorely damaged." He says the priority for the Obama administration is to continue the phased withdrawals from Iraq and to seek a negotiated solution in Afghanistan, arguing that history shows no country has been able to impose a solution there.

As a long-time foreign policy expert and a former participant in high-level presidential policymaking, what is your judgment on how the Bush administration did over the past eight years in foreign affairs?

I would say that almost everything it did drained and lessened American power in the world.

Can you elaborate?

The Bush administration didn't use American power to solve problems and basically used it in ways that made the problems worse. We see this on almost every front. Take North Korea and Iran, for example. President Bush threatened those countries not to develop uranium enrichment that could be used to build nuclear weapons. And he made very strong statements saying that nuclear development would be unacceptable. And at the same time, he refused to have serious negotiations with them. The result was that both those countries moved much closer to nuclear weapon capabilities; in the case of North Korea, they probably achieved it.

U.S. credibility, therefore, was sorely damaged. When a great power makes warnings like that and doesn't back them up, and the other side goes forward and does precisely what it's told not to do, we end up having much less standing in the world. That's what happened there. We run into the same set of problems in South Asia.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.