New glimpses of Bush worldview

An extraordinary fortnight of revelations about US preparedness before Sept. 11 has provided at least this preliminary picture: When the Bush foreign policy team took office in 2000, it was determined to focus on big nations and traditional power geopolitics, not Al Qaeda and the new terrorist threat.

The Clinton people? Sure, they'd made terrorism a priority. But top Bush officials were dismissive of their predecessors' performance, and determined to avoid what they felt were Clintonesque mistakes.

It's not unusual for a new administration to want a sharp change in direction. Given the problems topping the news at the time - chaos in Russia, Chinese belligerence - a return to a more realist foreign policy appeared to make sense.

But it's also not unusual for a new administration to find that the world looks far different from inside the White House Situation Room than from the campaign trail. Adapting to circumstances takes time - and Al Qaeda was determined that time was one thing the US would not have. Seen in that context, the attacks of Sept. 11 hit the nation at a vulnerable seam in its history, when new political leaders were still adjusting to Islamist terrorism's dangers. "It's a very hard thing, changing governments," says Francis Bator, professor emeritus of political economy and history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

This does not mean that the allegations by former antiterrorism chief Richard Clarke of lack of interest in terrorism among Bush officials are true. Some aspects of Mr. Clarke's accounts have been challenged by people he worked with.

But the central notion that Mr. Bush did not make terrorism as high a priority as hindsight shows it should have been is one that he himself has admitted. Mr. Bush said as much in an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for his book on the response to Sept. 11.

Furthermore, many of the most important foreign-policy appointees to the new Bush administration were old-school geopoliticians. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had held the same job under Richard Nixon, at the height of the cold war. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice's academic background is in Soviet studies.

Their belief was that power matters in international affairs, and that power resides in big states. In January 2000, Ms. Rice published an article on national interests in the journal Foreign Affairs that contained subsections headed "Dealing With the Powerful," "Russian Weakness," and "Coping with Rogue Regimes." Terrorism is listed as a priority only insofar as it is backed by Iran or other state sponsors.

The article, presented as a sort of agenda for the incoming Bush team, rejects the priorities of the previous administration.

The Clinton White House assiduously avoided "a disciplined and consistent foreign policy that separates the important from the trivial," wrote Rice.

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