President Bush's foreign policy: innovation or consolidation? Stephen Hoadley considers the foreign policy approach of the Bush administration and finds an extraordinary level of engagement with the world.

• Author: Hoadley, Stephen

The late Lewis Fretz wrote his last assessment of US foreign policy for the NZIR in January 1999 (vol 24, no 1). In his article he found American foreign policy characterised by `malaise and passivity'.

President Clinton, distracted by scandal, was doing too little to address the Asian or Russian financial crises, Serbian brutality in Kosovo, human rights abuses in South-east Asia, turmoil in Indonesia, civil wars in Africa, or covert nuclear weapons programmes in Iraq and North Korea. The United States was frittering away its power by dashing about as a global sheriff for an ephemeral `international community'. Fretz cited with approval Samuel Huntington's thesis that America and Europe (`the West') should co-operate to guard their values and achievements against `the rest' of the world if necessary.

Would Lewis Fretz have approved of developments during the ensuing three years? Clinton's firmness on Kosovo and leadership of the NATO bombing campaign to expel Serb forces might have aroused some last-minute respect for the out-going President. But Fretz would have reserved greater enthusiasm for candidate George W. Bush. For starters, Bush was a descendent of a politically accomplished conservative family and was unblemished by scandal in his personal life (his college-years insouciance and his spotty business record aside).

Bush's and Republican Party leaders' castigation of the Clinton administration's fatuous `liberal internationalism' would have been welcomed. So would Bush's pledges to concentrate on regions central to US interests rather than deploy peacekeepers promiscuously, avoid `nation building', resist infringement of US sovereignty by international organisations and treaties, deal firmly with Russia, China, and rogue states, upgrade military capabilities and build a national missile defence system.

Fretz would certainly have rallied to Bush's war on terrorism and all that it entailed: unashamed patriotism, strengthened security measures at home, and military action against perpetrators and their government-accomplices abroad. He would have regarded Bush and his lieutenants Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz as the kind of leaders America needed in the trying times after 11 September. He might have had reservations about Colin Powell ... too internationalist.

Different path

But US policy has not unfolded quite as hoped, or feared, three years ago. The fear on the part of internationalists that Bush would lead the...