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PRUDENT PLAYERS OF THE GLOBAL GAME
A WORLD TRANSFORMED The tweaking T-shirt hit home partly because the 41st President did indeed prefer the global stage to the domestic front. Like many in his generation, Bush was shaped by his experiences as a pilot in World War II and as a young adult at the height of the cold war. As President, Bush had an opportunity to witness firsthand, and to help shape, some of the most important moments of the fin de siecle: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the birth of a ''New World Order'' in which a lone superpower takes on rogue states. He was far more impatient in dealing with what he considered the petty partisans of Capitol Hill and the apolitical wizards of the Federal Reserve. In the end, Bush's obsession with foreign policy, and his inability to convince most Americans that he understood their economic woes cost him reelection in 1992, to a Democrat whose campaign mantra was: ''It's the economy, stupid.'' But the former President's global fixation has produced a memorable memoir. A World Transformed is unusual in many ways. It is an innovative joint memoir by Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. The two pen alternating sections in the first person. The narrative is woven together with third-person descriptions that they wrote jointly. And the text is supplemented with a series of revealing and heretofore unpublished excerpts from Bush's White House diaries and contemporaneous tape-recorded comments. All of this sounds like a formula for a confusing jumble of a book. Happily for the reader, it is not. Bush and Scowcroft have put together a long but compelling look at some very important historical developments. While other participants, from Margaret Thatcher to General Colin Powell, already have weighed in with their own version of events, the Bush-Scowcroft tome is a valuable contribution to the record because Bush has for years kept so many of his own thoughts and conversations private. Now, students of history can read Bush's secret letter to China's Deng Xiaoping, in which the President desperately tried to balance criticism of the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown with admissions that the students had created ''enormous problems'' for those ''required to keep order.'' Or the diary entry in which Bush admits that he wouldn't have been upset had Saddam Hussein been killed during a gulf war bombing raid. Bush's foreign policy team is exposed, warts and all. The book is remarkably candid, as well as occasionally self-critical. A World Transformed focuses on four topics: the tense U.S. relations with China following Tiananmen, the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the gulf war. Bush and Scowcroft choose to skip other international crises of the Administration, including the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama, the U.S. intervention in Somalia, the attempted coup in the Philippines, and the emerging Balkan bloodbath. The only important omission is the Yugoslav civil war, which may have been excluded because it wasn't a policy success. Bush is obviously the central character in the book. Sometimes he is a keenly interested observer, sometimes a vital participant in unfolding events. He prefers to move with caution, sometimes resisting bold moves because, in the words of TV impressionist Dana Carvey, they ''wouldn't be prudent.'' He desires freedom for Lithuania and Ukraine, but he doesn't want to press too hard for fear of destabilizing Mikhail Gorbachev's regime. He wants to improve relations with China so much that he vetoes politically popular economic sanctions imposed by the Democratic Congress. Bush's modus operandi on the global stage was personal diplomacy. He developed close friendships with key figures--Gorbachev, Deng, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand, Saudi King Fahd, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. These relationships helped Bush through some sensitive stretches, whether in building an anti-Iraq coalition or preventing Soviet intervention in Germany and Poland. While Bush is clearly an expert behind-the-scenes diplomat, he also comes across as a public figure who never escapes the shadow of his charismatic predecessor, Ronald Reagan. On several occasions, Bush notes that he didn't possess the skills of the Great Communicator. Recalling his preparation for a televised address about the Persian Gulf tensions in August, 1990, Bush conceded: ''I felt a little nervous. I held out my hand to see if it was shaking....I knew I was not nearly as good as Ronald Reagan in these situations.'' Scowcroft emerges from the book as a hard-line cold warrior and, along with Vice-President Dan Quayle, one of the staunchest conservatives in the Bush inner circle. He's constantly voicing his suspicions of Gorbachev. While Bush is on a first-name basis with his friend Mikhail, Scowcroft cautions that the Russian is a dedicated communist trying to save a dying system. Scowcroft's sections of the book are well-written, and he's not afraid to admit when his analysis turned out to be wrong. One quibble: The book devotes too much space (190 pages) to the gulf war. While the description of Administration efforts to mobilize the allied coalition is essential, the military strategy and details sometimes get boring. Readers know what happened. The value added by Bush and Scowcroft is their depiction of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. With Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, enmeshed in a sex scandal, the ex-President is experiencing a renaissance of sorts in public opinion polls. As time goes by, Bush is sure to get more credit for helping eastern Europe (and perhaps China) move toward democratization and free markets. But A World Transformed shows the former President's limits as a geopolitical thinker. His biggest shortcoming: He doesn't focus enough on the economic implications of global change, thinking primarily in diplomatic and strategic military terms. And today, the key global tensions are economic. As the 21st century nears, the sun is setting on the generation of world leaders molded by the 1940s. Bush, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Mitterrand, and Kohl all lost their jobs. A younger group of pragmatic wonks, such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is emerging. Bush deserves his due. He guided the U.S. through a potentially treacherous period while avoiding a major confrontation with a dying Soviet Union or a recalcitrant China. He set an example for new-era international alliances in the war against Iraq. The economy may have cost him a second term. But as is obvious in A World Transformed, it has not cost him a place in history.
BY RICHARD S. DUNHAM RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Oct. 1, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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