Tax Plan Works; Foreign Policy Flails

Here’s a basic rule of politics: If you know what you’re doing, do more of it. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, do less.

George W. Bush has mastered half of that wisdom. By sticking to tried-and-true economics, the president looks smart indeed as the economy comes roaring back. But by venturing out into make-it-up-as-he-goes-along foreign policy, Bush looks amateurish at best.

Start with what Bush knows well: growing the economy. He campaigned on a tax cut, signed it into law last June and has stuck with it since. Yes, the economy softened in 2001, but that was a carry-over from the Nasdaq bubble-popping that began the year before--combined, of course, with the shock of Sept. 11.

Yet Democrats were quick to attack Bushonomics. “Not only did the tax cut fail to prevent a recession,” declared Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Jan. 4, “it probably made the recession worse.”

In fact, this blip of a recession was probably the mildest in history. And on Friday, Bush’s stay-the-tax-cut course was vindicated; the Commerce Department announced that the economy grew by a whopping 5.8% in the first quarter of 2002. Now, one might say that cutting taxes, then holding fast to that position, is not exactly the greatest intellectual achievement of all time. But that’s the point: If something works, why fool with it?

Now to foreign policy. Immediately on Sept. 11, Bush was transformed from semi-isolationism to hyperinternationalism; early and easy success in Afghanistan left him convinced he could eradicate terrorist evil around the world.

At its best, conservatism is a synonym for caution. But Bush ignored the accumulated lessons of successful statecraft for democracies, which emphasize building alliances and invoking international law. His hot-tempered and ill-considered rhetoric--throwing around historically loaded words such as “crusade” and “axis of evil”--bespoke a recklessness that was guaranteed to backfire.

At home in Texas, Gov. Bush knew the danger of premature polarization; he would never have walked into the rambunctious Texas Legislature and snarled, “You’re either with me or against me.”

But that’s precisely the ultimatum he has delivered to the world. Bush thought he was going to start a stampede against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but instead the herd of international opinion scattered every which way.

In the meantime, the Israeli-Palestinian fight has erupted yet again. The 43rd president, having pretended for more than a year that he would handle that issue differently from his predecessors--by not even attempting to handle it--now finds himself desperate to catch up with events and cobble something together. Call it post-hoc ad hoc.

Bush has built his new approach on two dubious pillars: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whom Bush virtually alone in the world describes as “a man of peace” and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, leader of a country that seems to be, at best, an ambivalent American ally. If Sharon and Abdullah are the twin peaks of administration policy, it’s little wonder that the rest of the world rejects Bush’s distinction between black hats and white hats.

The president inherited a set of free-marketish ideas about running the economy that has served him well because it served his predecessors well. But he invented, on the spot, an absolutist and unilateralist “doctrine” about fighting certain flavors of foreign evil that is unlikely to work, because going it alone rarely works.

Yes, there’s always room for innovation. But those who seek to improve on standard operating procedure should begin by knowing more than those who went before them.

Yet in foreign policy as opposed to economic policy, Bush dismisses the past. He doesn’t want to transcend tradition; he wants to simply ignore it.