Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama hailed from different political parties but shared a common foreign policy outlook.
In administrations 20-plus years apart, each brought a realpolitik outlook of sorts to the White House. Their principles guided American foreign policy according to concrete international interests — even if it meant cozying up to less-than-savory world leaders. Each alternatively faced criticism and praise in various quarters for seeming to shun democratic ideals in favor of lower oil prices, regional stability in the Middle East, and other concrete outcomes.
In June 1989, early into Bush’s White House tenure, China’s military suppressed a pro-democracy movement demonstrating in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Using tanks and armored cars, the military crushed the demonstrations and fired into the crowd, killing hundreds of protesters.
Despite outcries in Congress — controlled by Democrats — Bush did not want to jettison improved U.S.-China relations by overreacting to events. His administration imposed only limited sanctions. In subsequent months, Bush sent national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, deputy secretary of state, to China to try to repair the damaged, but not destroyed, relationship.
Nearly a quarter-century later, Obama in the White House similarly made human rights only one of several foreign policy considerations. As the Syrian civil war worsened into 2013, dictator Bashar Assad fired rockets filled with sarin gas into towns around Damascus, killing an estimated 1,400 civilians. Obama said use of chemical weapons against civilians would trigger a “red line,” seemingly for military action.
But there was little enthusiasm in the U.S. Congress for action, so Obama quietly backed down from his threat and punted the solution to the Russians, who were all-too-willing to flex their power-brokering influence in the Middle East.
Bush and Obama were also linked, at least obliquely, by concerns over the Iraq War. Bush never publicly opposed the Iraq effort, considering his son, President George W. Bush, launched the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of 9/11.
But Scowcroft in 2002, by then long out of office, wrote an August 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” which proved prescient in its warnings about the destabilizing effect an attack in Iraq could have on the broader Middle East. The article was largely seen as a proxy for the views of foreign policy realist George H.W. Bush, who was fast friends with Scowcroft, his one-time co-author on a 1998 book about world affairs.
Though Bush was a Republican and Obama a Democrat, their realist view of foreign policy lined up in nonpartisan ways. Obama, of course, was considerably more vocal in his opposition to the Iraq War — it helped propel him to the Senate in 2004 and the presidency four years later.
