Bush's Amazing Achievement

By Jonathan Freedland

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
by Chalmers Johnson
Metropolitan, 354 pp., $26.00

Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Basic, 234 pp., $26.95

Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World
by Dennis Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25.00

1.

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.