Thursday, April 5, 2001

By Naftali Bendavid, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON—President Bush planned to spend this week focusing on his education and tax plans, with a routine to-do list including a speech to the National Restaurant Association and a visit to a Delaware Boys and Girls Club.

Instead, Bush has not only been engulfed in the first international crisis of his presidency, trying to extract an American military crew held in China, he also has heard urgent pleas from leaders of a violence-torn Middle East, confronted a hot-button decision on aid to Yugoslavia, and faced European anger over U.S. withdrawal from a global warming treaty.

Like presidents before him, Bush is discovering that his carefully wrought agenda is being overtaken by the eruptions of foreign policy in ways that never happened when he was a governor or a candidate. The phenomenon is especially striking in Bush’s case because he relies so heavily on controlling the agenda and avoiding distractions.

"He clearly wants to focus on his tax cut, but with an incident like this occurring, the whole world’s attention turns to that," said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who chaired the House International Relations Committee. "A president does not control the agenda completely, and President Bush has certainly not been able to control this one."

The China crisis presents opportunity and peril for Bush. If he brings the air crew home to joyous family reunions, his stature and popularity could be enhanced.

But if the spy plane episode ends badly, with a long captivity for the crew members, it could drain Bush’s political capital and make it harder for him to push such domestic priorities as his tax cut, his education plan, his faith-based initiative and Social Security reform, all of which already face strong opposition.

"International events affect the president’s image and the sense that people here and abroad have of the president’s control over events," said Stephen Walt, a foreign policy specialist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. "If the China issue isn’t resolved well, that will undermine his political position at home and make it harder for him to get his agenda through."

Among other things, a lengthy detention of the plane’s crew risks reviving memories of the Iranian hostage crisis that plagued former President Jimmy Carter. That, in addition to a reluctance to inflame tensions, is one reason the White House has been so careful not to characterize the 24 service men and women in China as hostages or captives.

This is, in a sense, the first real test for a president with no previous foreign policy experience. But Bush is hardly the first president to enter the White House having campaigned almost entirely on a domestic agenda, only to find foreign crises altering his plans.

Then-candidate Bill Clinton mocked Bush’s father for his world travels, suggesting they showed an indifference to the economic plight of U.S. citizens, and promised to focus "like a laser" on the domestic economy. But in his first year, Clinton faced flare-ups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia and Haiti. He appeared unprepared and was accused of inconsistencies.

But the pattern goes back much further. "The classic example is the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson," said Robert Shapiro, who heads the political science department at Columbia University. "Johnson won a landslide election in 1964 and had grand domestic ideas—the War on Poverty, the civil rights agenda. It got completely derailed."

In Bush’s case, the clash between a carefully controlled domestic agenda and the vicissitudes of international affairs seems especially stark.

For one thing, Bush showed little interest in global affairs before taking office, rarely traveling overseas. In contrast, former President Ronald Reagan spent many years formulating positions on the Cold War. Bush’s father had been CIA director and ambassador to China.

And Clinton spent a year abroad as a Rhodes Scholar.

Bush also favors a governing style of predictability and discipline. He boasts of his unwavering priorities as a matter of principle and has done his best to keep to a relatively strict timetable: first education, then tax cuts, then a faith-based initiative, then reform of Social Security and Medicare.

That single-mindedness, which served Bush well in Texas, created some odd moments this week. As U.S. diplomats were finally visiting the 24 beleaguered crew members on Hainan Island Tuesday, Bush was addressing the H. Fletcher Brown Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington, Del., talking about education reform.

But the China conflict is only the most dramatic example of foreign policy matters asserting themselves in Bush’s first weeks in office.

Often it has been Bush’s very insistence on disengaging somewhat from world affairs that has prompted an international reaction and, in fact, forced him to respond.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah are urging Bush to take a more active role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose recent eruptions of violence finally prompted Bush to call on both sides to calm the tensions.

Bush’s decisions to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, an international global warming treaty, and to refuse negotiations with North Korea over its missile program have prompted protests from European allies. The president’s plans for a missile defense program have also caused friction with the Europeans.

And as Bush was visiting Mexican President Vicente Fox at his ranch several weeks ago, he found himself ordering bombing raids on Iraq in retaliation for attacks on U.S. planes.

"Foreign policy has a way of imposing itself upon you," said Bruce Jentleson, a former State Department official who advised Vice President Al Gore during the campaign. "Conscious efforts to minimize it don’t work. They didn’t work for Bill Clinton when he came in as a domestic president. I used to say in those days that if you don’t do foreign policy then it does you, and the same is true here."

Most observers say that Bush has handled the crisis well so far, taking a tone that is firm but not inflammatory. But if the Chinese do not relent soon, Bush will have difficulty keeping the situation from affecting his other priorities.

"It’s not quite a hostage incident, but it could end up being as long as a hostage incident," said Colin Campbell, director of the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University. "My fear is that his core supporters will get impatient with him not securing a rapid return of the personnel and maintaining the integrity of the aircraft.

Those are pretty tall orders, and I just don’t know how you negotiate these waters."

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