‘After listening to the speech President Bush gave after Sept. 11, you’d think we were the only country in the world,’ said Institute of Politics Fellow Ted Sorenson yesterday at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University during his discussion, ‘American Leadership in Time of Crisis.’
‘We keep flaunting how powerful we are economically and militarily, and we keep boasting about how great we are,’ Sorenson said. ‘We need to be making friends and diminishing resistance. A large idea in the world is that America is indifferent to the poverty and hunger in the world.’
David Gurgon, a journalist who served as a White House political analyst during the Clinton administration, joined Sorenson to discuss how American presidents deal with foreign diplomacy.
According to the Constitution, Congress is supposed to be more powerful than the executive branch, forcing the president to shape decisions around the sentiments of Congress, Gurgon said.
When it comes to foreign policy, ‘the president has a tendency to create policies with his advisors and then go to Congress,’ Gurgon said, adding that the president often will not take the attitudes of Congress into account.
Bush started making policies involving war with Iraq without approval of Congress, following a trend put in place by past leaders, Gurgon said, citing examples such as John F. Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, Sorenson acknowledged Bush’s recent actions imply a greater concern for outside views.
‘I’m glad our current president has reversed a decision he made in early September and decided to wait for approval from Congress and the United Nations,’ he said.
Gurgon emphasized the United States needs to be working toward creating international law with checks and balances built into it, just like what James Madison worked to create in the United States.
Checks and balances are necessary because ‘those people who are never in doubt are not good leaders,’ Sorenson said. ‘We should be wary of those people for leaders.’
‘It seems like we’re trying different things without a really clear direction on how to approach the outside world,’ said one member of the small audience. ‘I see the ideology of the political right affecting major issues in the world, like the Middle East.’
‘That idea is not emerging as a prevailing view in the Bush administration, but it is a view,’ Gurgon responded. ‘The hawks are all pushing forward, and some think Iraq is the first stop, not the last.’
‘You can’t underestimate how much Bush has to appease the hawkish wing of government,’ said Alison Loat, a first-year student at the Kennedy School of Government who attended the lecture. ‘Externally, the opinion of the United States negative, so a lot of work still needs to be done.’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
