Test of Bush's presidency....

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Stratfor.com
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
11.01.2005
The Bush Presidency: Can It Survive?
By George Friedman

Last week, President George W. Bush's appointee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, withdrew her nomination after being savaged from all directions. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was indicted on a series of charges having to do with the investigation of a White House leak. And the president of Iran said that Israel has to be wiped off the face of the map. None of these events, by themselves, rise to the level of historical significance. But the three taken together, along with other signs and portents, might well be of enormous significance.

We have long argued that one of the primary reasons for the invasion of Iraq was the Bush administration's need to demonstrate to the world in general and the Muslim world in particular that the United States not only has the stomach for war, but also can be decisively victorious. This capacity has not been obvious to anyone, including Americans, since the Vietnam War.

Rightly or wrongly, it had become an idée fixe that the United States shied away from wars in general and from potentially extended wars in particular.Now we are in a period of warfare when the power of the U.S. president -- due to a variety of factors -- has become uncertain. And that is no trivial matter to either the United States or a host of foreign powers.

The Presidency: A Decisive Force?

n wartime, the power of the U.S. president is critical. It is the job of a skillful politician in wartime to do whatever it takes to keep the presidency strong and decisive. And as history shows, presidents who are able to hold the political center and act decisively-- despite challenges faced in the war or on other political fronts -- will survive.

Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through a series of unmitigated disasters -- surviving more than a year of defeat and confusion -- because he nurtured confidence among the public and carefully manipulated situations so as to deflect blame from himself. Adm. Husband Kimmel, the commander-in-chief of the Pacific region, was fired after Pearl Harbor; Roosevelt was not.

Conversely, the center did not hold under Lyndon B. Johnson. His legitimacy and credibility as a warfighting president collapsed with startling swiftness when his own party turned on him -- and the opposition, though still supporting the war, never had any confidence in his warfighting strategy. Roosevelt survived the fall of the Philippines; Johnson could not even survive the Tet Offensive.

Therefore, the question that Bush now faces is whether he can hold the center -- whether his presidency can survive as a decisive force.

Let's define this with some care. Unless he was to be convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors by the House of Representatives, Bush will serve as president until January 2009. But there are two kinds of presidents: those with sufficient power to act unilaterally in foreign affairs -- that is, who assume they have the political power to speak and act with confidence -- and those who lack or have lost that ability.

For instance, by the time of the final North Vietnamese assault, Gerald Ford had no practical military or diplomatic options left. His political and legal position precluded that: The center of his presidency was in shambles. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, retained his military option relative to Yugoslavia in spite of other political problems. He was able to move from military action to covert action to diplomatic action at will -- and, in general, without reference to external forces. He was a free agent. Ford could not control the situation in Vietnam, whereas Clinton could control the situation in Kosovo, Bosnia and ultimately in Serbia. The center of Clinton's presidency held.

Polls and Perceptions: The Fight for the Right

The question now, therefore, is whether the center of Bush's presidency will hold or whether he will, for a time or permanently, lose the ability to act unilaterally in foreign affairs. There have been many factors influencing the U.S.-jihadist war in general, but the key now is this: Can Bush still make unilateral decisions? For instance, does he have the ability to decide whether to bomb Syria? Or attack Iranian nuclear reactors? Could he withdraw forces from Iraq without appearing to be capitulating? Can he keep promises to Iraqi factions and credibly threaten them as well?

Part of the answer lies in foreign perceptions of the U.S. presidency, which brings us to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent statement on Israel. The statement was rooted in many things. Some of it has to do with domestic Iranian politics; some of it is simply the repetition of long-standing Iranian policy; some of it has to do with the fact that the new president likes to make bellicose statements. But the single most important factor is that Iran does not fear the United States quite as much now as it did six months ago. Words are merely words, but the Iranians were probing for reaction. That the French condemned the statement was of little interest to Tehran; whether the Americans condemned it - and, if so, how -- was the key. The Iranians were taking the measure of American politics. And the response from Washington, we note, was quite mild in comparison to most other Western governments.

Bush's popularity rating, after Libby's indictment was announced, stood at 39 percent, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll. This is actually pretty good news for Bush, believe it or not. As we attempted to show in past articles, there is a point of support beyond which Bush's Republican base could be deemed to be fragmenting, and that is the point at which a presidency becomes unrecoverable. Bush has been at that point, which we peg -- at the extreme -- at 39 percent, for several weeks now. Polls have been showing him in the 37 percent to 45 percent range, which, given error rates, puts him realistically in the very low 40s. Bush's support did not bounce back (given all the issues at stake, a bounce would have been miraculous), but -- and this is the critical point -- his core has not fragmented.

This is one reason why Miers, whose nomination to the Supreme Court raised outcries among Bush's core base of conservatives, had to be ditched fast -- before the indictments in the Plame case came out. At this point, Bush must, above all costs, hold his base solidly. He can't even begin to worry about the center, let alone the left, if the right deserts him. Miers' appointment raised doubts on the right. Bush could not be certain what the grand jury would say or who would be indicted, but he knew there would be indictments. By getting Miers out of the way, he rallied his base at a moment when they would be the vital -- and only -- element he could bank on.

If the early polls are correct, the move worked. This does not necessarily mean, however, that Bush is out of the woods. The social conservatives are only one of three core constituencies within the Republican Party. The others are economic conservatives and businesspeople and, finally, the national security constituency. Miers' withdrawal shored up support among the social conservatives, and the recent nomination of Ben Bernanke to be the new chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve seems to have delighted the economic conservatives.

But the Plame affair is raising hackles in the third constituency: The national security core is restive, to say the least.

There are several strands within this constituency. First, there are the military service members and their families, who are extremely unhappy with the failure to expand the military and to halt the frequent and long deployments that active duty, reserve and National Guard troops are enduring. There is another round of stop losses coming for the next rotation to Iraq -- further alienating a natural Republican constituency that is in near-revolt.

Then there are those who vote Republican because they believe the GOP is more likely to support the defense and intelligence community: These are the ones who are most shaken by the Plame affair, which cuts against their perception of Republican practice.

Finally, there are those who generally believe that Republicans are more effective at conducting foreign policy. It is the support of this group that is now at risk. These are overlapping constituencies, obviously.

But that strand of the Republican base that supported the war even without the issue of WMD, or that could accept misleading reasons for going to war, is now raising fundamental questions about the execution of the war. A recent poll shows the president is slipping in this core constituency.

Political Cycles and Windows of Opportunity

The rest of the world is sensing this weakness. They have long experience with the American political cycle and its periodic weakening of the president. They understand that, despite the objective power of the United States, internal constraints frequently tie the president's hands -- limiting his ability to act or to change the pattern of his actions. These cycles can last from months to several years, but they are not permanent. They do, however, open important windows of opportunity.

The obvious example is the Nixon-Ford presidency and Vietnam, but the weakness extended into the Carter presidency as well. As events in Iran and Afghanistan transpired, options that might have been available under other circumstances were not available to Carter. Indeed, except for the perception that political circumstances precluded the United States from taking certain actions, it is not clear that either the Iranian revolutionaries or the Soviet Union would have behaved in exactly the manner they did. They were able to exploit the temporary situation to their benefit.

The United States is enormously powerful, and viewed within the context of a century, these periodic paralyses are not decisive. It has been established that Woodrow Wilson was unable to control U.S. foreign policy after World War I. Roosevelt could not act as early as he would have liked on World War II, and others were unable to keep control in Vietnam and Iran.

But these substantial moments of paralysis and failure did not define the main trajectory of U.S. power -- which consistently increased throughout the century. To those who doubt this premise, consider the fate of Japan and Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There were those -- Henry Kissinger included -- who were prepared to argue that the United States was a declining power after Vietnam. The decline is hardly visible 30 years later.

This is not to understate the dilemma now facing the president. Bush's problems are not trivial: He will be president for three more years, and if he is paralyzed, other nations will have opportunities for action they might not otherwise have. But it has to be kept in balance. The United States does not come near to utilizing its full power -- a few years of paralysis historically have been compensated for at later dates, with minimal harm. But as we saw in the 1930s and 1970s, these periods of U.S. paralysis can have substantial consequences during that time -- and particularly for the history of other nations. The rest of the world may have proceeded pretty much as it would have anyway during those periods, but the course of Vietnamese and Iranian history did not.

At this moment, a number of secondary powers are considering the condition of the American presidency. Iran, as we have noted, is one. Russia is another. For Moscow, the United States is an ally and competitor. If the American presidency is about to enter a black hole, Vladimir Putin will behave differently than he otherwise might. China is dealing with a host of American demands. Those will be dealt with differently if Bush no longer commands the government but only the White House. And in Iraq, of course, every party is looking at American will and American guarantees.

Bush has not lost his presidency. He is merely close to it, and other presidents have recovered from such precarious positions. What he needs is a decisive victory within the United States.

That is why he has nominated Samuel Alito, a staunchly conservative judge, for the Supreme Court in place of Miers. Bush is putting all of his eggs in one basket, looking again to shore up his core base of support. If he can win this battle, the entire psychology of his presidency will shift in his favor. If he loses, then he probably will be no worse off than he was before.

Presidents have power to the extent that they are perceived to have power. At this moment, Bush's status is uncertain. He has certainly not yet lost his presidency, but he has not restored his standing in the polls. It is interesting, therefore, that the status of U.S. foreign policy rests at this moment on the outcome of a decidedly internal matter: the battle for the Supreme Court. The fates of other nations -- and the United States can be decisive in determining their fate -- rest on the idiosyncrasies of American domestic politics.

This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com.
© Copyright 2005 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.

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