Why George Bush Sr. Was Not Re-Elected Derek Chollet | Big Think

Why George Bush Sr. Was Not Re-Elected

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According to Derek Chollet, the end of the Cold War left Americans unconcerned about foreign policy, and the Democrats used this to their advantage.

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Derek Chollet:

Derek Chollet is the Principal Deputy Director of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff. Prior to joining the State Department, he was a Senior Fellow at The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a non-resident fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Program and an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University. During the Bill Clinton administration, he served in the State Department in several capacities, including as Chief Speechwriter for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, and Special Adviser to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Mr. Chollet also assisted former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher with the research and writing of their memoirs, Holbrooke with his book on the Dayton peace process in Bosnia, and Talbott with his book on U.S.-Russian relations during the 1990s. He was foreign policy adviser to Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), both on his legislative staff and during the 2004 Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign.

Mr. Chollet has been a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at The George Washington University. He is the author, co-author or coeditor of five books on American foreign policy, including The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, coauthored with James Goldgeier (PublicAffairs, 2008). His commentaries and reviews on U.S. foreign policy and politics have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Washington Monthly, and many other books and publications. Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Mr. Chollet was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: Why George Bush Sr. Was Not Re-Elected

Derek Chollet: There was a sense with the Cold War over that foreign policy mattered less as a political issue and what’s interesting is the Democrats saw this as a huge opportunity. Foreign policy, and national security more specifically, had been an Achilles heel for Democrats really since Vietnam, and how the Democratic presidential candidate in the elections in ’76 and ’80 and ’84 and ’88 would approach communism was a very divisive issue within the party and also then troubling politically because there was a sense of weakness and inability. So when the Cold War ends many Democrats were very optimistic, not only that foreign policy would matter less, and there were some who believed that who thought we could sort of take care of things here at home but also that foreign policy could be different. The struggle wasn’t just about how strong you would be against communism.

Topic: Bill Clinton and the neoconservatives

Derek Chollet: One of the things that’s interesting looking back, particularly given how notorious neo-conservatives had become in the last seven or eight years, neo-conservatives were, in the ‘70s, Democrats. Big D Democrats who had left the party more or less in the wake of Vietnam believing that Democrats had become soft on national security issues and on the fight against communism specifically. So it’s interesting, many of the characters, people like Richard Pearle, had worked for Democratic politicians in the 1970s. But they were hawkish on the Soviets and hard line in terms of the Cold War. So there was a hope that some Democrats had in 1992 and some of the influential advisors to then Governor Clinton, candidate Clinton, in 1992, was that with the Cold War over and this bitter divide over communism gone, that neo-conservatives would actually come back into the party and many prominent neo-conservatives in the 1992 campaign endorsed Bill Clinton for president. They were very unhappy with George H.W. Bush, they believed that George H.W. Bush didn’t care enough about promoting democracy, that he didn’t do enough to stand up to dictators around the world. Remember in the early 1990s Bosnia exploded as Yugoslavia fell apart and Bill Clinton in the campaign of ’92 criticized George H.W. Bush for not doing more in Bosnia, for not doing enough to stand up to,

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