America’s 41st president, George H. W. Bush, hated the word empire, but he knew how to run one. He was president at the moment the Berlin Wall fell: when the United States instantly became a unipolar power. His deft foreign policy made him the second greatest one-term president in American history (after James K. Polk, who oversaw the largest-ever expansion of our territory, making us truly a continental nation). The elder Bush knew exactly how to both project and husband American power. In order to keep the Pacific stable, he refused to break diplomatic relations with China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as members of the Washington policy and intellectual class then were demanding. He refused to make a victory tour through Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, in order not to humiliate the Soviets, who might then have used military force to preserve the Warsaw Pact. And he refused to march on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, for fear of dismantling the Iraqi state.
The elder Bush was fond of saying that “public service is a noble calling,” a conviction that was connected to his understanding of American empire. As our last aristocrat in the White House, the elder Bush was always deeply solicitous of not only his own staff, but of the federal bureaucracy. He saw government service as a noble calling because he deeply understood that he couldn’t have accomplished anything without the veritable army of diplomats, area specialists and civil servants who did the meticulous staff work leading up to the momentous decisions of his presidency.
Bush, a World War II hero as a Navy pilot, believed fiercely in America’s mission abroad. This made him an idealist and the best kind of imperialist: a reluctant one, who comprehended that it was a talented bureaucracy that projected world power through him. And it wasn’t only Bush who understood this fact. Henry Kissinger once told me that while he had differences with the State Department’s Arab experts, he never could have accomplished what he did in the Middle East without them. He relied on the men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service to tell him what was happening on the ground in each Middle Eastern country where he thereafter conducted a master class in diplomacy.
Yet these are the very people whom the Trump administration is moving not only to fire, but to humiliate.