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Looking "Presidential"

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ZAGREB — President Bush leaves for Europe in a few days. Likely one of the last foreign trips of his Presidency, Bush's five-day visit to Kiev, Bucharest, and Zagreb offers him a chance to work on his image and his legacy — each in bad repair. The timing is both good and bad.

First the good: The NATO Summit in Bucharest, centerpiece of his trip, is the largest meeting ever of NATO heads of state and government, and comes with the kind of "visuals" that White House media relations staffers love: "group photos" of international statesmen with the U.S. President at the center, handshakes across conference tables, impressive dinners, exotic backdrops, and plenty of symbols of U.S. authority and prestige. He also visits Ukraine, a possible future member of the alliance, and Croatia, scheduled to receive a formal invitation to join NATO during the summit. Both of these countries have fresh memories of threats to their security (Ukraine in relation to Russia, Croatia in relation to Serbia), and therefore a broadly welcoming attitude toward NATO and the United States.

So far, so good. The less than favorable aspect to the trip's timing lies in the still-rancorous dispute between Greece and Macedonia — that is, between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (its official name at the UN). Macedonia is another would-be NATO member and is expecting a formal invitation to join. But Greece adamantly opposes allowing the tiny Balkan state to have the same name as Greece's northernmost province. Inexplicably, this long-standing objection has been allowed to fester during the lengthy process of Macedonia's preparation for admission to NATO. Barring a last minute breakthrough, this unresolved dispute over nomenclature makes the alliance seem inept or careless in its Summit preparations.

Another awkward but much more substantive issue is Afghanistan. The open-ended deployment of US and NATO forces to Afghanistan is the alliance's first real "out of area" challenge and it is far from clear that it is going well. Germany, for example, has opposed sending its troops from the relatively secure areas of northern Afghanistan to the dangerous areas of the south, where US, British and Canadian forces are in daily and deadly contact with Taliban fighters.

This conflict tends to get relatively little coverage in the US press but it is, in fact, the closest thing to a front line in the fight with armed Islamic terrorists. Now, because of the disagreement within NATO over burden sharing, this is a troubling portent for the alliance's future.

As Nicholas Burns, the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and former US Ambassador to NATO, put it last month:

NATO has now had to face an existential crisis of sorts. We are fighting in Kandahar, Oruzgan, in Helmand and Paktia provinces, United States military forces, with the Dutch and the Canadians and the British and the Estonians and the Romanians. But most of the other NATO allies are deployed to the west and to the north. When we have a firefight, as we did, a major firefight with the Taliban in September, and need tactical reinforcements, it's incumbent upon the NATO allies to come to the support of those NATO allies engaged in the combat. That did not happen in September. And too many of our allies have said that they’re quite willing to be garrison troops in the northern and western parts of the country that are relatively quiet and peaceful, but not willing to come down to where the Taliban is crossing the border in great numbers and where al Qaeda is also taking on the American, Afghan, and those NATO allied forces that I named.

This is fairly ominous language and signals that, within NATO, consensus on Afghanistan is at risk.
Of course, having a fixed date well in advance of a Summit can serve the useful purpose of being a deadline by which solutions to knotty problems must be achieved. So we may find that the seemingly esoteric problem of Macedonia's name and the existential problem of NATO's deployments in Afghanistan will be solved, after all, before the 26 leaders meet in Bucharest late next week.

But that leaves another awkward moment. Outgoing Russian president Vladimir Putin will also visit Bucharest at NATO's invitation. Formally, the Russia-NATO Partnership is the reason for Putin's attendance, but there are very few signs of late that the partnership is working well. For Bush, once famously quoted as having "looked [Putin] in the eye…and got a sense of his soul," and found him "trustworthy," this is a challenge to his legacy and less than fortuitous planning. When Putin and Bush were new to their jobs, Russians could expect free elections and a free press and Americans could expect strong multilateral relations with Russia and Europe. When they meet in Romania, perhaps for the last time, it will be a reminder that such expectations are now less than warranted.
U.S. Presidents have reason to travel, even in their last months in office when their influence over events at home and abroad begins to wane and whatever they say is fodder for the political campaigns of those who want to take their place in the White House. Mr. Bush has said that he wants to "sprint to the finish," which is understandable. But achieving big results overseas has eluded most Presidents in their final months. Just looking presidential may be all one can hope for. The problems that eluded resolution in seven plus years will be difficult to solve in seven plus months.

 

Author

Mark Dillen

Mark Dillen heads Dillen Associates LLC, an international public affairs consultancy based in San Francisco and Croatia. A former Senior Foreign Service Officer with the US State Department, Mark managed political, media and cultural relations for US embassies in Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Sofia and Belgrade, then moved to the private sector. He has degrees from Columbia and Michigan and was a Diplomat-in-Residence at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins. Mark has also worked for USAID as a media and political advisor and twice served as election observer and organizer for OSCE in Eastern Europe.

Areas of Focus:
US Government; Europe; Diplomacy

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