The Early Months: Clear-Eyed Realism

Abstract

The election of George W. Bush as the forty-third president of the United States raised questions about the direction of America’s foreign policy with his hand at the helm. While Bush expressed some of his views during the October 2000 presidential debates, a carefully timed series of interviews and speeches earlier in the campaign had sketched out the course his administration would pursue in the international arena. In particular, the ideas of his father’s former National Security Council (NSC) staff member Condoleezza Rice and tutorials with major foreign policy officials from the Reagan and first Bush administration provided the core concepts and ideas that George W. Bush then embraced.