How well Bush played into Islamist hands

Islamic extremists, along with the Middle East in general, have a basic logic to their actions. It is all about macho humiliation and saving face. Faced with a cool, calm and rational President like Obama will be, the Islamic fundamentalists would not have been able to sucker the US into a cowboy strategy that pitted the US against the world in a venue that does not allow the US to use the kinds of weapons that is strongest in. George Bush felt his manhood threatened by the terrorists, and wanted to fight it out mano a mano to humiliate the Islamicists. In this way, the US was maneuvered into fighting on the terrorists' own terms -- the only way they even had a chance.

Reinserting the US into the Network of Nations

A key element of the Bush doctrine has been US unilateralism and isolationism. Nicholas Kristof puts it nicely:

Mr. Bush’s presidency imploded not because of any personal corruption or venality, but largely because he wrenched the United States out of the international community. His cowboy diplomacy “defriended” the United States. He turned a superpower into a rogue country. Instead of isolating North Korea and Iran, he isolated us — and undermined his own ability to achieve his aims.

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An important thing to realize is that this was not an unanticipated outcome of some policy. It was well-understood the moment the US embarked on this path. See an excellent article in Foreign Affairs by John Ikenberry, written in 2002. He ends the article with these two paragraphs:

In contrast, America’s older strategic orientations—balance-of-power realism and liberal multilateralism—suggest a mature world power that seeks stability and pursues its interests in ways that do not fundamentally threaten the positions of other states. They are strategies of co-option and reassurance. The new imperial grand strategy presents the United States very differently: a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary power advantages into a world order in which it runs the show. Unlike the hegemonic states of the past, the United States does not seek territory or outright political domination in Europe or Asia; “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish,” Bush noted in his West Point address. But the sheer power advantages that the United States possesses and the doctrines of preemption and counterterrorism that it is articulating do unsettle governments and people around the world. The costs could be high. The last thing the United States wants is for foreign diplomats and government leaders to ask, How can we work around, undermine, contain, and retaliate against U.S. power?

Rather than invent a new grand strategy, the United States should reinvigorate its older strategies, those based on the view that America’s security partnerships are not simply instrumental tools but critical components of an American-led world political order that should be preserved. U.S. power is both leveraged and made more legitimate and user-friendly by these partnerships. The neoimperial thinkers are haunted by the specter of catastrophic terrorism and seek a radical reordering of America’s role in the world. America’s commanding unipolar power and the advent of frightening new terrorist threats feed this imperial temptation. But it is a grand strategic vision that, taken to the extreme, will leave the world more dangerous and divided — and the United States less secure.

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