The passing of George H.W. Bush , the 41st President of the United States, from 1989 to 1993, is an occasion to contextualise the current turbulence in the world, especially in liberal democracies. Three events — the first Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union — that occurred on his watch set in motion a global churn that remains with us. It was his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who gave a rhetorical flourish to America’s pursuit of global dominance in the 1980s with his depiction of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, and his call to “break that wall”. Bush, his Vice President and then successor, was not known for any rousing oratory, but one phrase he coined, a “new world order”, turned out to be defining, initially for its triumph, and now for its decline. “A new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace… Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known,” he said before the war that evicted Saddam Hussein’s invading army from Kuwait. His address in 1990 before a joint session of Congress was on September 11, a date that would become a haunting symbol of the world that we now live in, new but not in the manner that Bush had hoped.
Bush lived to see the unravelling of the world order and the concomitant turmoil. It is no coincidence that nationalists such as President Donald Trump define their politics as a rejection of the order that led their societies for the “last 30 years”. Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, American war enthusiasts who shaped its 43rd President George W. Bush’s bravado and arrogance, and contributed to his ignorance, rose to prominence during Bush Sr.’s presidency. He was also criticised for overlooking Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and neglecting Afghanistan in the years that followed the withdrawal of the Soviets. But connecting him to his son’s follies, the relative decline of America and the disorder in the world offers only a limited explanation of our times, besides being unfair to Bush’s legacy. Bush, the last World War veteran to become U.S. President, represented a bygone era. He sought the middle ground and consensus in domestic and international politics, built alliances, restrained his words in moments of triumph, had an introspective streak on the U.S. economic model, and tried to appreciate the aspirations of other countries. He sent handwritten notes to people and lamented how moderation had become a bad word. But change was on the horizon. After him, conservative politics in the U.S., including that led by his son, took a strident turn. It is not surprising that he did not deny reports that he did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2016.
