Ben Buckman.net

A few months ago, media pundits debated whether it was appropriate to host the G8 summit in Russia, with an increasingly authoritarian Vladimir Putin stalling action on Iran’s nuclear development. The response from the administration was essentially that we will never get the Russians onboard if we’re not nice to them. This answer was accepted with a “let’s see” approach and the controversy was forgotten.

Well, the G8 summit just ended, and I am hard-pressed to recall what was accomplished. Oh, yes – there were Bush’s open-mouth-chewing, blunt comments about Hizbullah to Tony Blair. What happened to the agenda being about Iran’s nuclear program? What a coincidence, its proxy militia provoked a regional crisis just in time. Teheran was undoubtedly on every leader’s mind, but I doubt there was much mention of nukes or sanctions. With Putin rumored to have turned on the microphone that caught the embarrassing remarks, the “let’s unite the world against tyranny by making Vladimir feel good” strategy has been another feather in President Bush’s cap of achievement.

As Congress debated whether Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, the man all our efforts have brought to power, should be allowed to speak in its halls, the president found himself in a straitjacket of his own policies. A diplomatically incompetent America is now straddling the divide between the Shia Muslim majority in Iraq and the Jewish state their ideological brethren are fighting in Lebanon. The geopolitical delusion of fallen dominoes rising from chaos into a perfect line of pro-American order – presented as the intellectual vision justifying the Iraq war – could not have burned more fiercely this week than all the American flags in Palestine. The figurative slogan, “the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad,” has proven true. It is merely loaded with shipments of Katyusha rockets.

In the next few days, the Senate is supposed to take up the confirmation of our ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who was snuck through the back door of recess appointments a year ago. By all accounts, the warnings by his critics have proved true. His bullying threats to cut UN funding if reforms are not implemented have isolated him among potential allies and made the achievement of those reforms even more unlikely. In a time when the UN Security Council is central to the administration’s agenda for dealing with Iran, North Korea, Darfur and other urgent challenges, contempt for multilateralism is counter-productive at best. Yet his confirmation is expected to be a slam dunk for the administration.

Next on the Senate’s foreign policy agenda is the nuclear alliance with India that was off the public radar for so long (if it was ever on it in the first place). Foreign policy experts must be shaking their heads in perplexity at that one. At best it is a necessary evil to maintain old promises and counter Pakistan’s continuing nuclear buildup. More likely it is a dangerous hypocrisy that will make dealing with real nuclear threats more difficult than Bush has already made them. Either way it amazes me that so much strategic nuance went into getting that treaty crafted, yet the plan for stabilizing Iraq continues to be an intellectual vacuum of “stay the course” that wouldn’t pass as a high school political science thesis.

The only voluntary exchange resulting from the WTO global trade negotiations which collapsed last week was the blame exchanged with whiny rhetoric between the US and EU. With another administration one might wonder why so much emphasis is put on elections in the Arab world, yet free trade, the economic cornerstone of truly open societies, is allowed to stagnate. But really, there’s no need to wonder.

While Condoleeza Rice went on her Middle East tour promoting the strategy of doing nothing until NATO agrees to get bogged down in a new war in South Lebanon, our dear friend in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was on a tour of his own. From Belarus, where he formed a new strategic alliance involving weapons and oil, he went on to Russia and Iran, where we can safely assume support for America was not at the center of his discussions.

Meanwhile, the administration continues to insist it is right, everyone else is wrong, and public opinion at home and abroad be damned. An administration supporter might argue that we had many enemies in the Cold War, yet prevailed in our righteous cause. That (or any other argument supporting the president’s foreign policy) might hold some water, if the president actually led an Axis of Good marching in unity to counter all the Evil adversaries arising around the world.

But no such bloc exists. Tony Blair will be out of power soon and then our only European ally will likely join the ideological camp of its continental partners. With arms shipments to Israel coinciding with Iranian shipments to Hizbullah, and both countries deciding it’s easier to let others fight their war, Israel is more a proxy than a partner. The grand new idea for Iraq is an increased presence of American military policemen, making many wonder whether Al-Maliki is an adversary or a powerless puppet. The Romanian president was in the White House today, but I cannot even remember his name and I doubt I am the only one.

In short, the president has set in motion a chain of events that is bringing about the exact opposite of his grand long-term vision for the Middle East. He has lost every ally we had in a time when international unity is most critical, and the alternative, American unilateralism, has failed to achieve its basic objectives under his command. George Bush’s foreign policy has been ignorant in vision and incompetent in execution and there is no doubt the world is more dangerous as a result.

Looking at all this, I cannot help but ask the president: if you fail to achieve any of your goals, what good is being right?