The Wall Street Journal
A Bush Loyalist Gently States His Case to Neocons
May 24, 2007; Page A2
When Timothy D. Adams, an earnest 45-year-old who spent a decade working for the current President Bush and his father, took the podium at a ceremony on his last day as the Treasury's top international official, he chose to speak about the importance of humility in foreign affairs.
Humility. It isn't a word often used to describe President Bush's approach to the rest of the world -- one often seen both by admirers and critics as: Speak loudly and carry a very big stick. But Republicans skeptical of Mr. Bush's approach are emerging like blades of grass in the cracks of a decaying brick wall. Republican realists, who favor a more pragmatic, less ideological approach than the neoconservatives led by Vice President Dick Cheney, are ascendant. One of them, Robert Gates, has even replaced Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.
(snip)
"People envy us. They are in awe of us," he says in an interview. "But they're also anxious about us. They fear us. And those are a volatile combination of emotions that can undermine what we seek to do." Tough rhetoric, finger-wagging and lecturing isn't achieving American aims, he says. "In many places, they've stopped listening because we're so predictable in what we're going to say." The alternative? "We have to walk more gently, and we have to speak more gently," he says. That takes more time, he acknowledges, but it is more likely to succeed.
Mr. Adams says he is more convinced than ever of the virtues of multilateral institutions -- the IMF, the World Bank and the like -- despite their obvious flaws. "We need to live by the rules that we want others to live by," he says. "Hypocrisy is an easy trap to fall into."
(snip)
Mr. Adams, who remains a Bush loyalist, ducks a question about Iraq: "The president made the decision he made at the time he made it. It's an easy game to Monday-morning quarterback. He certainly doesn't need me to do it." But ask him what he is looking for in the next president, and this is what he says: "I'm looking for a candidate who wants to engage the world, who has spent time in the world, who understands we can't act alone.
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