George H. W. Bush

This chapter evaluates George H. W. Bush as a grand strategist. Determined above all else to preserve the elements of traditional American power amid a tumultuous world and to prevent as much as possible a rapidly transforming world from descending brinto chaos, Bush successfully achieved the markers he set in pursuit of this goal. These included sustaining relations with a reeling China, preserving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), uniting Germany, negotiating a continental-wide free trade zone designed to counter the rise of Asian and European economic consolidation, and protecting the sanctity of international sovereignty and the import of the United Nations in a post–Cold War world. Ultimately, gauging Bush's success in 1991, or in 2001, or in 2011 produces different answers. A hero in the first instance, perhaps the reason Americans faced problems in the Middle East in the second, he was by the third date largely celebrated for the restraint his son never exhibited. Times changed, his actions in office did not, nor did the central tenets he embraced and embodied as a strategist: he faced instability, believed in the stream of history, and by acting to ensure the American stability he considered paramount to security, helped keep chaos at bay.