The Bush Presidency: Can It Survive?

By George Friedman

Last week, President George W. Bush's
appointee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, withdrew her nomination after
being savaged from all directions. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, Lewis Libby, was indicted on a series of charges having to do with
the investigation of a White House leak. And the president of Iran said that
Israel has to be wiped off the face of the map. None of these events, by
themselves, rise to the level of historical significance. But the three
taken together, along with other signs and portents, might well be of
enormous significance.

We have long argued that one of the primary
reasons for the invasion of Iraq was the Bush administration's need to
demonstrate to the world in general and the Muslim world in particular that
the United States not only has the stomach for war, but also can be
decisively victorious. This capacity has not been obvious to anyone,
including Americans, since the Vietnam War. Rightly or wrongly, it had
become an idée fixe that the United States shied away from wars in general
and from potentially extended wars in particular.

Now we are in a
period of warfare when the power of the U.S. president -- due to a variety
of factors -- has become uncertain. And that is no trivial matter to either
the United States or a host of foreign powers.

The Presidency: A
Decisive Force?

In wartime, the power of the U.S. president is
critical. It is the job of a skillful politician in wartime to do whatever
it takes to keep the presidency strong and decisive. And as history shows,
presidents who are able to hold the political center and act decisively--
despite challenges faced in the war or on other political fronts -- will
survive. Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through a series of
unmitigated disasters -- surviving more than a year of defeat and confusion
-- because he nurtured confidence among the public and carefully manipulated
situations so as to deflect blame from himself. Adm. Husband Kimmel, the
commander-in-chief of the Pacific region, was fired after Pearl Harbor;
Roosevelt was not.

Conversely, the center did not hold under Lyndon
B. Johnson. His legitimacy and credibility as a warfighting president
collapsed with startling swiftness when his own party turned on him -- and
the opposition, though still supporting the war, never had any confidence in
his warfighting strategy. Roosevelt survived the fall of the Philippines;
Johnson could not even survive the Tet Offensive.

Therefore, the
question that Bush now faces is whether he can hold the center -- whether
his presidency can survive as a decisive
force. Let's define this with some care. Unless he was to be convicted of
high crimes and misdemeanors by the House of Representatives, Bush will serve
as president until January 2009. But there are two kinds of presidents: those
with sufficient power to act unilaterally in foreign affairs -- that is, who
assume they have the political power to speak and act with confidence -- and
those who lack or have lost that ability.

For instance, by the time
of the final North Vietnamese assault, Gerald Ford had no practical military
or diplomatic options left. His political and legal position precluded that:
The center of his presidency was in shambles. Bill Clinton, on the other
hand, retained his military option relative to Yugoslavia in spite of other
political problems. He was able to move from military action to covert
action to diplomatic action at will -- and, in general, without reference to
external forces. He was a free agent. Ford could not control the situation in
Vietnam, whereas Clinton could control the situation in Kosovo, Bosnia and
ultimately in Serbia. The center of Clinton's presidency
held.

Polls and Perceptions: The Fight for the
Right

The question now, therefore, is whether the center of
Bush's presidency will hold or whether he will, for a time or permanently,
lose the ability to act unilaterally in foreign affairs. There have been
many factors influencing the U.S.-jihadist war in general, but the key now
is this: Can Bush still make unilateral decisions? For instance, does he
have the ability to decide whether to bomb Syria? Or attack Iranian nuclear
reactors? Could he withdraw forces from Iraq without appearing to be
capitulating? Can he keep promises to Iraqi factions and credibly threaten
them as well?

Part of the answer lies in foreign perceptions of the
U.S. presidency, which brings us to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
recent statement on Israel. The
statement was rooted in many things. Some of it has to do with domestic
Iranian politics; some of it is simply the repetition of long-standing
Iranian policy; some of it has to do with the fact that the new president
likes to make bellicose statements. But the single most important factor is
that Iran does not fear the United States quite as much now as it did six
months ago. Words are merely words, but the Iranians were probing for
reaction. That the French condemned the statement was of little interest to
Tehran; whether the Americans condemned it - and, if so, how -- was the key.
The Iranians were taking the measure of American politics. And the response
from Washington, we note, was quite mild in comparison to most other Western
governments.

Bush's popularity rating, after Libby's indictment was
announced, stood at 39 percent, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.
This is actually pretty good news for Bush, believe it or not. As we
attempted to show in past articles, there is a point of support beyond which
Bush's Republican base could be deemed to be fragmenting, and that is the point at which a presidency becomes
unrecoverable. Bush has been at that point, which we peg -- at the extreme --
at 39 percent, for several weeks now. Polls have been showing him in the 37
percent to 45 percent range, which, given error rates, puts him
realistically in the very low 40s. Bush's support did not bounce back (given
all the issues at stake, a bounce would have been miraculous), but -- and
this is the critical point -- his core has not fragmented.

This is
one reason why Miers, whose nomination to the Supreme Court raised outcries
among Bush's core base of conservatives, had to be ditched fast -- before
the indictments in the Plame
case came out. At this point, Bush must, above all costs, hold his base
solidly. He can't even begin to worry about the center, let alone the left,
if the right deserts him. Miers' appointment raised doubts on the right.
Bush could not be certain what the grand jury would say or who would be
indicted, but he knew there would be indictments. By getting Miers out of
the way, he rallied his base at a moment when they would be the vital -- and
only -- element he could bank on. If the early polls are correct, the move
worked.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that Bush is out of
the woods. The social conservatives are only one of three core constituencies
within the Republican Party. The others are economic conservatives and
businesspeople and, finally, the national security constituency. Miers'
withdrawal shored up support among the social conservatives, and the recent
nomination of Ben Bernanke to be the new chairman of the U.S. Federal
Reserve seems to have delighted the economic conservatives. But the Plame
affair is raising hackles in the third constituency: The national security
core is restive, to say the least.

There are several strands within
this constituency. First, there are the military service members and their
families, who are extremely unhappy with the failure to expand the military
and to halt the frequent and long deployments that active duty, reserve and
National Guard troops are enduring. There is another round of stop losses
coming for the next rotation to Iraq -- further alienating a natural
Republican constituency that is in near-revolt. Then there are those who
vote Republican because they believe the GOP is more likely to support the
defense and intelligence community: These are the ones who are most shaken
by the Plame affair, which cuts against their perception of Republican
practice. Finally, there are those who generally believe that Republicans
are more effective at conducting foreign policy. It is the support of this
group that is now at risk.

These are overlapping constituencies,
obviously. But that strand of the Republican base that supported the war
even without the issue of WMD, or that could accept misleading
reasons for going to war, is now raising fundamental questions about the
execution of the war. A recent poll shows the president is slipping in this
core constituency.

Political Cycles and Windows of
Opportunity

The rest of the world is sensing this weakness. They
have long experience with the American political cycle and its periodic
weakening of the president. They understand that, despite the objective
power of the United States, internal constraints frequently tie the
president's hands -- limiting his ability to act or to change the pattern of
his actions. These cycles can last from months to several years, but they are
not permanent. They do, however, open important windows of
opportunity.

The obvious example is the Nixon-Ford presidency and
Vietnam, but the weakness extended into the Carter presidency as well. As
events in Iran and Afghanistan transpired, options that might have been
available under other circumstances were not available to Carter. Indeed,
except for the perception that political circumstances precluded the United
States from taking certain actions, it is not clear that either the Iranian
revolutionaries or the Soviet Union would have behaved in exactly the manner
they did. They were able to exploit the temporary situation to their
benefit.

The United States is enormously powerful, and viewed within
the context of a century, these periodic paralyses are not decisive. It has
been established that Woodrow Wilson was unable to control U.S. foreign
policy after World War I. Roosevelt could not act as early as he would have
liked on World War II, and others were unable to keep control in Vietnam and
Iran. But these substantial moments of paralysis and failure did not define
the main trajectory of U.S. power -- which consistently increased throughout
the century. To those who doubt this premise, consider the fate of Japan and
Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There were
those -- Henry Kissinger included -- who were prepared to argue that the
United States was a declining power after Vietnam. The decline is hardly
visible 30 years later.

This is not to understate the dilemma now
facing the president. Bush's problems are not trivial: He will be president
for three more years, and if he is paralyzed, other nations will have
opportunities for action they might not otherwise have. But it has to be
kept in balance. The United States does not come near to utilizing its full
power -- a few years of paralysis historically have been compensated for at
later dates, with minimal harm. But as we saw in the 1930s and 1970s, these
periods of U.S. paralysis can have substantial consequences during that time
-- and particularly for the history of other nations. The rest of the world
may have proceeded pretty much as it would have anyway during those periods,
but the course of Vietnamese and Iranian history did not.

At this
moment, a number of secondary powers are considering the condition of the
American presidency. Iran, as we have noted, is one. Russia is another. For
Moscow, the United States is an ally and competitor. If the American
presidency is about to enter a black hole, Vladimir Putin will behave
differently than he otherwise might. China is dealing with a host of
American demands. Those will be dealt with differently if Bush no longer
commands the government but only the White House. And in Iraq, of course,
every party is looking at American will and American guarantees.

Bush
has not lost his presidency. He is merely close to it, and other presidents
have recovered from such precarious positions. What he needs is a decisive
victory within the United States. That is why he has nominated Samuel Alito,
a staunchly conservative judge, for the Supreme Court in place of Miers. Bush
is putting all of his eggs in one basket, looking again to shore up his core
base of support. If he can win this battle, the entire psychology of his
presidency will shift in his favor. If he loses, then he probably will be no
worse off than he was before.

Presidents have power to the extent that
they are perceived to have power. At this moment, Bush's status is uncertain.
He has certainly not yet lost his presidency, but he has not restored his
standing in the polls. It is interesting, therefore, that the status of U.S.
foreign policy rests at this moment on the outcome of a decidedly internal
matter: the battle for the Supreme Court. The fates of other nations -- and
the United States can be decisive in determining their fate -- rest on the
idiosyncrasies of American domestic politics.

© Copyright 2005 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.