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Apart from all the other excesses of the Bush Years there may be special problems for diplomatic history and historians. To some degree this is rooted in the changing dynamics of international relations but it also has a policy aspect. When the diplomatic history of the presidency of George W. Bush comes to be written these problems will have to be taken into account. In consequence farmers laboring in the fields of history will face new and daunting challenges.
Gone now is the florid hope—myopically optimistic that it was—that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history. Less than two decades afterwards the world is quite different but remains very much an international enterprise—a diplomatic enterprise among other things—its vibrant history still to be captured. To record these events and divine the reasons for them historians are going to need new tools, or perhaps to change the ways in which we deploy the more traditional tools in our kit. Doing history will be harder, but it can be equally useful and even more rewarding. What follows is a reflection on this theme.
First to the dynamic factors. Wearing my hat as a political scientist I would observe that the role of the nation state on the international stage is weakening. Hopes for an American ascendency—empire, unique superpower, call it what you will—proved ephemeral and perished in the flames of George Bush’s foreign adventures. The international system, no longer exhibiting the bipolarity of the Cold War era, is not quite multi-polar either. Three key global developments have threatened the span of control the nation state has long enjoyed. The first is technological change, which has accelerated the pace of every kind of phenomena, from evolving crisis to monetary flow. Nation states are slow to respond and increasingly lack dominance over the requisite factors at the center of rapidly evolving situations. The second is a new empowerment of belief systems, whether they be political, religious, cultural, or ethnic. Ingrained beliefs, increasingly strident, are supplanting rational calculation as motivators for action. Very often these belief systems are transnational in nature but even where they are not they generate centrifugal forces that loosen the bonds within nation states and among alliances. The third key factor is a loosening of international norms for permissible behavior, which magnifies the dimensions of horrors as well as reducing the acceptability of national countermeasures. Needless to say these factors operate in tandem with each other and further complicate efforts to respond. The incredible rise in the importance of so-called “non-state actors” and the increasing prevalence of failed states stands in testament to these dynamics.
What does this mean for diplomatic history? Much of our work has operated from a state-central perspective. Historians analyze national policies, study factors influencing a state’s institutions, survey the evolution of a nation’s culture, and so on. A nation’s response to crisis or war, the state’s approach to international diplomacy, its military strategy, its intelligence apparatus—all are elements historians typically study in isolation even while nations and their institutions are increasingly operating to cope with the systemic elements that are transforming the globe. Diplomatic history is thus in danger of focusing on just one part of the dinosaur.
The emerging history of the Bush administration provides a good illustration here. President George W. Bush took office with every advantage. The United States was the unquestioned superpower—some said “hyperpower” or fantasized about empire. Bush enjoyed economic prosperity built on the efforts of his predecessor, military might, national security primacy second to none. But Bush pandered to political and ideological groups in his base, weakening his advantage. When a non-state actor—Al Qaeda (working in service to a different ingrained belief)—challenged America with its attacks, President Bush responded with a generalized escalation, initiating what he called the “Global War on Terror;” and invading Iraq. In both those endeavors he utilized means beyond the permissible, manipulating intelligence to create a casus belli, torturing prisoners to extract information. The military engagements themselves resulted in an overstretch of U.S. power, while Bush’s methods horrified allies and weakened the fabric of international support for U.S. actions. Once Bush’s pandering on economic policy, along with rapacious international and domestic businesspersons, combined to produce a market collapse, American supremacy went into eclipse. Because the consequence of globalization had been to create a tightly intertwined global marketplace, a Wall Street crisis was capable of triggering a global near-depression, further impacting other countries’ views of the United States.
When analysts come to explore this history the mere analysis of one or another Bush government department, or one facet of the total picture, will be insufficient to explain the diplomatic history—or indeed the history as a whole. Absent the wholesale squandering of U.S. resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis might not have been nearly as debilitating. Without Iraq, Afghanistan might have been do-able—but would U.S. economic developments have led to the same outcome? Without renditions and torture the security services’ efforts to neutralize terrorist groups would have benefitted from greater international support—in fact that may be true for the Afghan and Iraqi wars as well. Diminished United States standing in the world complicated every other diplomatic effort as well. Without the Bush belief in generalized war—war of civilizations, if you like—U.S. authorities might have been able to manage the military effort in a sustainable fashion.
In short appreciating the Bush era will require application of a variety of historical methods. Presidential studies and institutional ones will be necessary to explain the activities of Bush and his vice-president, Richard Cheney, and their sway over the bureaucracy. International history will be required to understand the obstacles posed to U.S. actions as a result of the lukewarm, sometimes positively negative reactions of alliance partners and international audiences. Cultural history will be needed to layer in reasons why Bush and his terrorist adversaries evolved such overheated belief systems. Economic history must be central too because the mushrooming problems in that arena posed ultimate constraints on American action.
Layering in varieties of history—using a panoply of tools to present an articulated vision of these years—will be central to explaining the Bush era. But doing this will actually broaden diplomatic history, enrich it, and sensitize practitioners to a variety of causal factors that have often been left aside in traditional studies. History will be better as a result.
John Prados
John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author, most recently, of _Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1954-1975_ (University Press of Kansas) and _How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History_ (Potomac Books, forthcoming).