Bush Fails to Assert Global Leadership

Bush Fails to Assert Global Leadership

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair met yesterday to discuss pressing global concerns in advance of next month’s G-8 meeting in Britain. After everything Blair has done to support Bush’s hugely unpopular war in Iraq, Bush stabbed Blair in the back by refusing to put significant American leadership behind efforts to provide economic relief for Africa and to address global warming.

• The Bush administration is the lone hurdle to providing significant economic assistance to Africa, the world’s poorest and hardest hit continent. Nearly all the pieces are in place to implement Blair’s ambitious plan to double aid to Africa to $50 billion. Studies by the World Bank, the IMF, and several expert commissions say the plan will work and the world’s major donors have pledged their support. President Bush remains the one hold-out against this new “Marshall Plan” for Africa. Bush rejected Blair’s plan again yesterday, but tried to fool the press by using Blair’s visit to “unveil” a plan to spend $674 million more in emergency aid in Africa – funds already approved by Congress.
  
  
• President Bush’s idea of tackling global warming is to hire an oil industry lobbyist to deny that the problem exists. Blair plans to make climate change a central issue at the G8 meeting, and has been pressuring industrialized nations for months to boost energy efficiency and use more renewable energy. Meanwhile, Bush still prefers to deal with global warming by attacking the facts: according to today’s New York Times, his administration has been letting a powerful oil lobbyist personally edit government climate documents “in ways that play down links” between man-made emissions and climate change.
  
  
• America is less powerful when it fails to assert global leadership. American power throughout the twentieth century was greatly enhanced by the use of all of our tools—military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural—to lead the world in defense of democratic values and economic opportunities for all. The Bush administration has rejected this notion, preferring to use military might almost exclusively and shunning the concerns of the international community as trite. Contrary to the worldview of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and John Bolton, this is not a showing of power. It is a sign of real weakness and failure to assert true leadership. American values and interests suffer because of this intransigence.