PRESIDENT Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of US foreign policy from the Middle East to North Korea he has claimed to have become a born-again realist. “And it’s, kind of ... painful ... for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page,” he said at his July 7 press conference, adding, in an astonished tone, “Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people.”

Two years ago at the Republican convention he boasted of his “swagger, which in Texas is called walking”. But in the face of the consequences of his failures, he has swaggered into a corner.

In a befuddled response to Israel’s reoccupation of Gaza and bombing of Lebanon, Condoleezza Rice, asked for restraint while the president offered support. Bush has regressed to embracing no policy, just as he did when he first entered office. His failure to give the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, any tangible gains to show his electorate helped Hamas win. Now the US’s abandonment of any peace process is yielding a downward spiral of mutual recrimination in the region.

Similarly, on Iraq, Bush has returned to mouthing inane platitudes about “victory”. He promises to “defeat” the enemy while ignoring his generals’ admonition that a political solution is critical as Iraq descends into civil war.

What the president doesn’t know and when he didn’t know it remain pertinent. In January 2003 Bush met three prominent Iraqi dissidents who, in discussing scenarios of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, “talked about Sunnis and Shias. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms.” Peter Galbraith, who was involved in Iraqi diplomacy as a Senate aide for decades, carefully sources this anecdote in his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

Bush’s policy toward North Korea is paralysed, reduced to kowtowing to China in the forlorn hope that it would implore the hermit kingdom to forswear developing nuclear weapons and firing test missiles. But the Chinese have declared they will veto any US-initiated sanctions in the UN Security Council. When Bush was president-elect, Bill Clinton’s national security team had a treaty with North Korea essentially wrapped up. The incoming Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was enthusiastic.

As president, Bush cut off diplomacy and humiliated Powell and the South Korean President, Kim Dae-Jung, for seeking to continue the process associated with Clinton. In Bush’s vacuum — a series of empty threats — North Korea predictably reacted with outrageous violations intended to capture US attention. The US negotiator, Charles “Jack” Pritchard, was constantly subverted by the then undersecretary of state, John Bolton.

After Pritchard quit in 2003, Bush sent a new negotiator to the six-party talks in 2004 but prohibited him from meaningful negotiation. The North Koreans responded with extreme gestures, and Bush has answered that he will not speak to them directly. “By not talking with North Korea,” Pritchard wrote last month in the Washington Post, “we are failing to address missiles, human rights, illegal activities, conventional forces, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and anything else that matters to the American people. Isn’t it about time we actually tried to solve the problem rather than let it fester until we blow it up?”

The North Korea debacle shows that Bush’s ruinous approach began before the Iraq invasion, indeed before 9/11.

(Sidney Blumenthal , a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars)

sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com