George W. Bush: Diplomat

By Massimo Calabresi

The greatest sign of hope for peace in the Middle East didn't come on Nov. 27 in Annapolis, Md., when President George W. Bush convened a new round of Arab-Israeli talks. It came a month earlier, across the Chesapeake Bay in the little village of St. Michaels, as Bush signed an Executive Order protecting red drum fish and striped bass. Bush was on his way to lunch with Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a waterfront home there, and the President opened his signing remarks by saying that Laura Bush had gone ahead to the lunch. "I guess you could say she's the taster," Bush said.

O.K., so it was a joke. But that unguarded comment offered a rare glimpse at the split that has opened up between Bush and his hard-line Veep. Since 2001, Cheney has been against just the kind of U.S. involvement in Arab-Israeli affairs that Bush is embracing, arguing that the early creation of a Palestinian state could jeopardize Israel's security. And the peace talks are part of a larger trend. In the past two years, Bush has negotiated with the North Koreans over their nuclear weapons and offered the Iranians incentives to talk about their nuclear ambitions, sometimes directly overruling Cheney and his allies in the process. Skeptics say the flurry of diplomacy is designed to distract attention from the war in Iraq. But whatever the motivation, the result is clear: if the spectrum of Republican foreign policy has Cheney and the unilateralists at one end and Bush's father George H.W. Bush and the multilateralists at the other, then W. has come home.

The Annapolis summit was an echo of the elder Bush's 1991 Madrid Conference. Going in, the Israelis and Palestinians agreed to restart negotiations on the tough issues of dividing Jerusalem, establishing borders and providing for the return of Palestinian refugees. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed the Saudis and the Syrians to join the talks in a show of support for the weak Palestinian leadership. Still, the summit, which set the goal of creating a Palestinian state at peace with Israel by the end of 2008, was a risk. If talks fail, says George Salem, a co-founder of the Arab American Institute, "then the extremists will attempt to once again take control. The stakes are quite high."

Difficult it may be, but the President's new fondness for diplomacy is bearing some fruit. On North Korea, Bush approved talks led by a top Clinton negotiator, Christopher Hill, who eventually delivered a deal to dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear reactors. And Robert Malley, a Clinton Middle East negotiator, argues that Bush stands a better chance than Clinton did of creating a Palestinian state. Says Malley: "The Israeli and Palestinian leaders share a personal bond and need for success, President Bush has more time left than Clinton did, and the Arab world is being actively courted."

To be sure, Bush isn't as good a diplomat as he thinks he is. He likes to tout two tactics: a hard-knuckle approach he credits with bringing the North Koreans to the table, and the personal rapport he claims to have developed with leaders like Russia's Vladimir Putin. Being able to look fellow leaders in the eye and call them by their first name, Bush thinks, makes it easier to put tough demands on the table. But foreign diplomats say he lacks subtlety in both approaches, forcing black-and-white decisions on adversaries and focusing on individual leaders instead of their countries' interests. "I don't have much to say for his diplomatic style," says a senior Arab diplomat involved in the Israeli-Palestinian talks, after cataloging Bush's shortcomings.

Cheney's office denies any division between Bush and the Vice President over the new diplomacy. A senior Administration official acknowledges, however, that the President has increasingly overridden Cheney and offers a nuanced view of the relationship. "There's an almost temperamental or dispositional question here. You see it in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The President said, 'I understand there are risks, but I think that this is a shot worth taking.' The Vice President would probably emphasize the risks more, and I think that's just the person he is."

Maybe it's the optimists' time. At the morning meeting in the U.S. Naval Academy's superintendent's house on the banks of the Severn River in Annapolis, Bush pushed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to agree on a negotiating plan for the next 14 months. That was an unexpected turn in the talks. "[Bush] said it was rare when people find themselves at a juncture where they can change history," said a senior Administration official in the room. "It was very moving." But history judges leaders on their handling of the national interest, not on their emotional touch. After Annapolis, the two sides will pursue the tough final-status peace issues in small groups, with the U.S. playing referee. It is how the President performs in that context -- out of the spotlight, in the weeds -- that will determine how history judges his late-blooming passion for diplomacy.