George H.W. Bush and the Quest for a Realistic Foreign Policy – Talking Points Memo

George H.W. Bush and the Quest for a Realistic Foreign Policy – Talking Points Memo: 
By John Judis December 4, 2018 6:57 pm 

George H.W. Bush’s death, like that of John McCain, has brought forth glowing tributes that are veiled critiques of our current president.  In response, some commentators on the left have pointed to Bush’s flaws and failures – from his rejection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the Willie Horton ad in the 1988 campaign and from the Iran-Contra scandal (of which he was an unnamed conspirator) to his tacit acceptance of the Tiananmen Square massacre.  

I want to sidestep this debate to say something 80 percent positive about one aspect of Bush’s foreign policy that most clearly came to the fore in his dealings with Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Bush and his two top foreign policy advisors – Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft – were realists.   I don’t mean this in the academic sense. They didn’t believe that countries’ mode of government is irrelevant to their foreign relations. What they had was a realistic appraisal of what America could accomplish in foreign policy and of the kind of change other nations were willing to accept.  

Unlike many liberals and neo-conservatives, they didn’t believe that the United States could transform the world into liberal capitalist democracies. Managing the Cold War’s End: Bush and Baker deservedly get credit for negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union for the reunification of Germany.  During these negotiations in February 1990, Baker promised not to expand NATO eastward. Baker told Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that if they agreed to the reunification of Germany, “there will be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction or NATO’s forces one inch to the East,”  

NATO’s precipitous expansion, initiated under and championed by Bill Clinton and by a neo-conservative lobby led by a former Lockheed executive, planted the seeds for the revival of an older Russian nationalism and for our current conflict with Russia and Vladimir Putin.