Retired from politics for eight years after serving as Florida governor, 62-year-old Jeb Bush hopes his European trip, before announcing June 16 as a 2016 GOP candidate, burnishes his foreign policy credentials. Bush promised to counter Putin’s aggression to “isolate his corrupt leadership from his people,” making no sense. Today’s U.S. and U.N. sanctions for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, including booting him off the G8 March 24, 2014, have isolated the Russian Federation much like the defunct Soviet Union in the Cold War. Bush’s hidden message is he’d be tougher on Putin than President Barack Obama or, for that matter, Democratic frontrunner former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bush blamed Obama for dramatic declines in military spending, knowing full well that his own Party’s austere budget engineered the cuts.
Delivering his first 2016 campaign speech, Bush promised a more muscular response to Putin, whose March 1, 2014 seizure of Crimea and de facto annexation of Ukraine’s Southeastern Donbass region, leaves former Soviet satellites in the Baltic or Eastern European countries like Poland fearful Russia. Blaming the U.S. decline in defense spending for the lack of resolve in confronting Putin, Bush shows how little he knows about geopolitics, especially when it comes to Russian. Not one of the 28 member of the European Union seeks to confront Moscow, despite Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Ukraine’s 49-year-old billionaire chocolate baron President Petro Porshenko has practically stood on his head begging the EU and U.S. for military assistance in confronting Putin. Bush implies that he’s got backing from the EU to confront Putin more directly.
When Jeb’s brother was president, Putin ordered his army to annex pro-Russian enclaves in Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia Aug. 12, 2008. Former President George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney did far less in Georgia than Obama has done in Ukraine. “Russia must respect the sovereignty of all of its neighbors,” said Bush, knowing that neither the U.S. nor EU have the stomach for confronting the Kremlin. Urging a tougher U.S. foreign policy without regard to Brussels would put the U.S. back in a unilateral Cold War. Meeting in Schloss Elmau Krun, Bavaria, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Obama agreed with the U.K, France, Italy, Canada and Japan to maintain the current sanctions against Moscow. All agreed to ratchet up sanctions if Putin steps out of line. Bush’s plan of more military bluster would make a bad situation worse.
Bush implies that his foreign policy would supply more arms and military advisors to Ukraine, despite obvious warnings from Putin that he’d respond in-kind. Bush thinks Putin “will push until someone pushes back,” ignoring the sanctions routine that has pushed the Russian economy into recession. Not one country in the EU or Caucasus states has the military to challenge any Russia, should Putin give the green light to the Red Army. Putin saw the Feb. 22, 2014 Kiev coup, ejecting Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovich, as a CIA or MI6 sponsored event, prompting an aggressive Russian response. Whatever drop in U.S. defense spending has more to do with transitioning from two active foreign wars than Obama’s attempt to cut the military. Bush’s tough talk against Putin is designed to bring foreign policy hawks and conservative over to his campaign.
Bush’s GOP talking points stem from the Republican National Committee blaming Obama, and now Hillary, for chaos in the Middle East and around the globe. Competing with GOP hawks, Bush must show he’s got the stomach to put U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and possibly Ukraine. When pressed recently about whether he agreed with the Iraq War, Bush reluctantly said that if he knew then, what he knows now, he wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. He suggests better intel on Saddam Hussein’s lack of weapons of mass destruction would have kept him out of Iraq. Jeb can’t admit the obvious that toppling Saddam caused the dreaded “power vacuum,” warned against by his father, President George H.W. Bush, that flooded Iraq and Syria with terrorists. Bush’s European trip burnishes his foreign policy chops about as much as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim as a Russian expert.
Bush’s tough talk against Putin wins him some GOP conservatives but doesn’t fool foreign policy experts at the EU and U.S. State Department. Given Russia’s strategic military advantage in Europe, there’s no interest in Brussels for a more confrontational approach. Jeb mentions nothing about his brother’s passive response when Putin marched the Red Army into Georgia in 2008. No matter how much the Bush-43 White House liked Georgian President Mikheil Saaskashvili, they weren’t willing to confront Russia militarily. Jeb’s bluster about confronting Putin tests the water with conservatives but means little to those in the EU and State Department that know the limits of U.S. foreign policy. Meeting with foreign ministry bureaucrats in Germany or Poland or Estonia’s presidents is no a crash course in foreign policy for the former Florida governor.
