Jeb Bush tries to shrug off family legacy on foreign policy

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, preparing for an all but certain presidential run in 2016, used the first major foreign policy speech of his nascent campaign to promote himself as a break from the past and present on international affairs — treading a narrow path between distancing himself from the records of his father and elder brother, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and alienating the Republican rank and file.

“I have been fortunate to have a father and a brother who helped shape America’s foreign policy from the Oval Office. I recognize as a result, my views will often be held up in comparison to theirs,” Jeb Bush said in a speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make, but I’m my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and my own experiences.”

Still, he extolled U.S. power as a “force for good” in the world and slammed Barack Obama’s administration for diminishing the United States’ influence around the globe.

“Under this administration, we are inconsistent and indecisive. We have lost the trust and confidence of our friends. We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies,” Bush said. “The great irony of the Obama presidency is this: Someone who came to office promising greater engagement with the world has left America less influential in the world.”

The younger Bush is making the case to voters that he will not repeat the mistakes of his brother, who led the country into a long, costly and, in the view of many Americans, misbegotten war in Iraq. At the same time, he must win the approval of GOP primary voters, many of whom are in favor of muscular military engagement in conflicts around the world.

“He has a special challenge,” said Wesley Renfro, an assistant professor of political science at St. John Fisher College who has studied the foreign policy doctrines of the two Bush presidents. “He really has to sell the idea that he is his own person but also espouse policies that are consonant with generic Republican values.”

Jeb Bush appears to be getting help shaping his worldview on foreign policy from a number of advisers who were prominent in the two Bush administrations, according to a list provided by his aides to Reuters.

Among them are James Baker, a Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush; Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, both secretaries of homeland security under George W. Bush; Stephen Hadley, a national security adviser under George W. Bush; Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush; and Paul Wolfowitz, a former deputy defense secretary under George W. Bush and one of the most vocal proponents of the war in Iraq.

Still, Renfro pointed out that many of the most prominent Republican thinkers on foreign policy inevitably worked for the last two GOP presidential administrations and that many of the figures on Jeb Bush’s list are considered moderates.

“A lot of the folks around Jeb are those who ascended in George W. Bush’s second term, and that’s a really important distinction,” he said. “They were advocating positions that were much less muscular, much less aggressive.”

In a question and answer session after the speech, Jeb Bush said there were shortcomings in the war in Iraq, including relying on false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and failing to ensure security in Iraq after the fall of President Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, Bush lauded the surge in American forces near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, calling it “one of the most heroic acts of courage politically that any president has done.”

Jeb Bush criticized Obama’s tactics on a range of foreign policy issues, from the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to his handling of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and his posture toward Iran in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program. He called for restoring the defense budget to levels before the cuts of the last four years.

Marc O’Reilly, an associate professor of political science at Heidelberg University who studies U.S. foreign policy, said most of Bush’s criticisms fall into the category of boilerplate GOP attacks on a president of the opposing party.

“‘He had made the United States weak, he’s abdicated leadership’ — that’s rhetoric. It’s overblown,” O’Reilly said. “Historians of American policy and political scientists like myself know the United States is as involved today as it has been in its history.”