BERLIN — There's no better place than Berlin to contemplate a Bush restoration in American foreign policy and to see that the prospect is viewed overseas with more qualms than the Republicans would like to admit.
Berlin, after all, is a symbol of the foreign policy triumphs of the last Bush administration--that momentous era when the Berlin Wall tumbled, Germany was reunified, the Soviet Union collapsed and America won the Persian Gulf War.
"We wouldn't be sitting here in Berlin today were it not for the United States and the help and protection it gave us," observes Klaus-Peter Gottwald, a German foreign ministry official, from behind his desk in a restored building that, until a decade ago, was headquarters of East Germany's ruling Communist Party.
One recurrent theme in George W. Bush's presidential campaign this year has been the suggestion that he would return America's relations with the rest of the world to the path blazed during his father's presidency.
Father's Team May Be Back
Even before he picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, most of the younger Bush's top foreign policy advisors came from the team that served his father from 1989 to 1992, such as Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Zoellick and Richard L. Armitage. If Bush wins, that team could well be joined by Colin L. Powell as secretary of State.
Moreover, in his speeches the Republican presidential candidate often criticizes the Clinton administration for going astray in foreign policy--for example, by failing to pay enough attention to the overseas alliances on which the last Bush administration relied so heavily.
"Alliances are not just for crises," the Texas governor said in his main foreign policy speech last November. "They are sustained by contact and trust. The Gulf War coalition, for example, was raised on the foundation of a president's vision and effort and integrity."
But the problem with Bush's critique is that America's allies, like the Germans, do not entirely agree. Here, few people accept the suggestion that a new Bush administration could or should bring American foreign policy back to the glory days before 1992.
It's a Different World Out There
"That was a long time ago and many things have happened since then," notes Joachim Krause, deputy director of the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Affairs.
