ABSTRACT
During his campaign for president, George W. Bush seemed to endorse a prudent realist policy like that of his father, George H.W. Bush. In the presidential debate of October 11, 2000, he responded to a question about previous U.S. interventions by endorsing Ronald Reagan’s interventions in Lebanon and Grenada and his father’s in Panama and the Persian Gulf. But he balked at the humanitarian interventions of Bill Clinton. Though acknowledging that Slobodan Milosevic needed to be checked in Bosnia and Kosovo, Bush carped that the Europeans should have taken the responsibility, and he implied that the American troops still stationed there should be withdrawn. He agreed with his father’s decision to intervene in Somalia but opposed the mission creep that had made it a nation-building exercise. He denounced Clinton’s intervention in Haiti as a nation-building exercise from the outset. “I am worried about overcommitting our military around the world,” he proclaimed. “I want to be judicious in its use. I don’t think nation-building missions are worthwhile.”
