Go It Alone: Bush's Foreign Policy Strategy

Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series of Audits of the Conventional

Wisdom, a project of the Center for International Studies at MIT.

The adoption of Security Council Resolution 1701 brought a halt to the month-long Israeli-Hezbollah war. UNIFIL will be greatly expanded with a more vigorous mandate to back Lebanese assertion of full sovereignty and control over southern Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah's militia and missile sites. But is an agreement hammered out in Manhattan sustainable on the ground? Was success in New York confirmation that the Bush administration has come to terms with the utility of the United Nations and the facility of our friends and allies? Or does the agreement's ambiguity and fragility underscore the costs of dogged non-engagement with our adversaries, even in times of crisis?

Resolution 1701 can succeed only if it is the beginning of a process. That process can only succeed if all players are brought to the table -- the players within Lebanon, the players in the region, and possibly the player beyond, Iran. While the resolution could be negotiated by remote, a process that gets at the real root causes requires direct, protracted, patient engagement by the highest levels of the administration.

This is the third major policy challenge where the Bush administration turned to its friends from Old Europe and some former enemies to help broker a way out. Friends and allies provide channels and political cover into regimes we otherwise prefer not deal with. The Europeans and the Russians seek a graceful but credible way for both Washington and Tehran to back down and save face on the nuclear weapons issue, and the "Gang of Six" provides cover for efforts to manage Pyongyang. While neither of these efforts has succeeded, neither have they failed, if by failure one means a resort to military action.

To some, this shift reflects the maturation of the administration's foreign policy -- that it has learned that the United States cannot and need not do everything alone, and that there are other tools in the tool box besides a hammer. The cynical would say that the change is not by design but by default; bogged down in Iraq, we have few real options beyond the diplomatic. The same cynics would note that the administration's credibility is at such ebb that we have abdicated our role as an honest broker while others, such as France, step into the vacuum.

The truly cynical would say that the administration decided to utilize the U.N. not in spite of its reputation for desultory debate but because of it. Going to the U.N. created the image of "doing something," while Israel tried to finish the job on the ground or at least set the markers for the internationally refereed neutral zone.

Make no mistake, Hezbollah provoked this round of violence and destruction, counting on an Israeli response to create a second front to Gaza, and bolster its credentials as the only true bulwark against Israel -- and thus validate the need for it to remain armed. The provocation was so naked that initial reactions from the region, and many Lebanese, were neutral to negative. That Hezbollah underestimated the fury of the Israeli response is a fair guess.

Israel, for its part, walked into the Hezbollah trap, responding as predicted, albeit ramping up the assault on the Lebanese infrastructure faster and more extensively than anticipated. While Hezbollah may have underestimated the scale and scope of the Israeli response, Israel's intelligence failure on the generosity of Hezbollah's friends in both the quantity and the quality of missiles poised to hit Israel is stunning. Despite a month of artillery pounding, 10,000 bombing sorties, 20,000 ground troops, the leveling of the Lebanese infrastructure and somewhere around 1,000 Lebanese casualties, Hezbollah continued to launch upwards of 200 missiles a day. Haifa was within missile range, as was the Galilee. Hezbollah remained unbowed. The mystique of Israeli invincibility was irreparably shattered.