During an event designed to introduce Jeb Bush’s foreign policy platform for his likely presidential bid, the former Florida governor found himself rehashing his brother’s war.
“There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure,” Bush said, using the passive voice, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, during a question-and-answer session after his prepared remarks.
Bush did not aim his criticism directly at his brother, former President George W. Bush, however. Instead, he praised the former president’s decision in 2007 to send a surge of troops into the country, calling it “one of the most heroic acts of political courage.”
But the discussion detracted from Bush’s overarching message: that he will be a candidate and, he hopes, executive, independent of his father’s and brother’s legacies.
“I am my own man,” Bush said.
But even as Bush sought to separate himself from his family, there were intermittent echoes of his brother’s and father’s administrations. At the top of his speech, Bush gave a shoutout to former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who served during President George W. Bush’s second term and attended the event Wednesday. And Jeb Bush cited his father’s and brother’s experiences and decisions as he explained some of his own foreign policy stances.
Nor did Bush break notably with either his father or his brother on foreign policy and national security, except with his brief assessment of the war in Iraq.
In a new statement of overlap, Bush said “for the life of me, I don’t understand” the debate over the National Security Agency’s metadata collection, started by President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and recently the source of controversy in Congress.
“We do protect our civil liberties, but this is a hugely important program,” Bush said.
For Bush, a former Florida governor who is preparing for a bid for the presidency, the remarks Wednesday marked the first occasion on which he has outlined his foreign policy strategy, which he summed up as “liberty diplomacy.”
“If we withdraw from the defense of liberty, the battle eventually comes to us anyway,” Bush said.
Bush introduced a five-pronged foreign platform, including growing the economy domestically, strengthening alliances, adapting to non-state-sponsored threats, backing up words with actions, and growing the military.
“Weakness invites war,” Bush said. “Strength encourages peace.”
The bottom line was at its foundation optimistic even as it was cautionary, hinting that Bush will continue to take a happy-warrior approach to his campaign message. “We’re in an ascendancy as a nation, we just have to start acting like it,” Bush said.
For Bush, part of the challenge of a presidential campaign will be convincing Americans that he has sufficient experience in the foreign policy sphere.
Bush began to make that case Wednesday, as he listed the continents and countries to which he has traveled, and noted that he spent time living abroad. He recalled a trade agreement he signed with the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “one of the greatest joys of my life.”
But if Bush was looking to present himself as confident and ready to act on foreign policy, he also laid bare some of his weak spots as a fledgling candidate.
He sped through his prepared remarks and seemed relieved when they were over. He pronounced the militant group “Boko Haram” as “‘beaucoup’ Haram.” And Bush said he “forced myself to go visit Asia four times a year to learn about the dynamic nature of the region.”
“It’s a long way from Miami,” he elaborated.
