WILL the second Bush administration be less bellicose, more multilateral? That’s what some of the president’s critics are suggesting, after his much-publicized visit to Europe. Joseph S. Nye, author of Soft Power, thought he saw in Bush a new convert who had belatedly, but wisely, forsaken flawed concepts such as unilateralism and preemption and adopted instead the tenets of Nye’s own volume. “The most striking thing at this point in Bush’s second term,” Nye recently intoned, “is his belated discovery of the importance of diplomacy and soft power.”
Clinton NSC veteran Nancy Soderberg recently expressed worry that Bush’s policies-often the opposite of those of the Clinton administration and thus antithetical also to the precepts of Soderberg’s just-released but ill-timed The Superpower Myth-well, might just work. “It’s scary for Democrats,” she stammered on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, “I have to say. . . . Well, there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s still hope for the rest of us. . . . There’s always hope that this might not work.” But later, when asked by Bill O’Reilly to explain her curious remarks, she echoed this strange new theme that Bush was finally getting it right: “I think there’s a second-term conversion going on with the Bush administration. I’d like to think it’s because they read my book. I think it has more to do with the fact that reality has seeped in. They’re starting to talk well of the French.”
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