Liberators or invaders? The opinions toward the U.S. held by young people like these Afghan orphans will limit our future policy options.
AP Photo/Manish Swarup

Opinions about President George W. Bush are divided, but no one questions that his successor will inherit a country profoundly altered by his policies. In the run-up to this year’s congressional elections, for example, President Bush persuaded Congress to pass a bill giving him authority to conduct searches and wiretaps without warrant, to designate anyone an "enemy combatant," including American citizens, and to deny those so-designated the traditional right of habeas corpus, meaning that they can be held indefinitely without charges or trial. The bill passed at a time when the president’s approval ratings hovered near 40 percent. The same day this new security bill passed the House, contents of Bob Woodward’s new book were revealed, including a report that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had ignored important warnings about Osama bin Laden’s plans prior to the 9/11 attack. (She denies this.) The book depicts a divided war cabinet that shielded an incurious president from unwelcome news on the insurgency in Iraq. Only a few days earlier, the New York Times had published conclusions from a report by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies stating that the threat from Islamic terrorists has grown, spurred by America’s presence in Iraq — claims that of course undermined core arguments upon which Bush had staked both the war and his presidency. With characteristic determination, the president overcame these obstacles and even opposition within his own party to drive the bill through Congress.

Political scholar Steven Weber is concerned that the next president will face a world more hostile to U.S. interests, with burgeoning populations of international youth whose image of America is Abu Ghraib, not the Normandy landing.

The legislation highlighted a central goal of this administration, and particularly of the neoconservatives within it. In their analysis, the supremacy that the United States exercised in world affairs after World War II (potential challengers in Asia and Europe having had their industrial base destroyed) had declined after the Vietnam War not as a result of shifting structural forces, but from a diminished presidential will and authority to forcefully project American military power. Following the attacks by al-Qaeda, the administration deftly crafted policies that expanded executive power by arguing that the new enemy — global, decentralized, and with access to potentially devastating technologies of terror — required fundamental rethinking, not excluding traditional constitutional understandings. One of the strongest advocates of this view has been Boalt Hall’s John Yoo. Posted in the Justice Department at the time of the attacks, Yoo is widely credited with writing legal memos defending presidential authority to ignore Geneva Convention restraints, including bans on torture. At a time when top military brass argue that such methods are ineffective and endanger American troops, California writer Quentin Hardy was curious how Yoo’s opinions have evolved. Would expanded executive powers survive Bush? Hardy found the law professor undaunted in his conviction that it must, yet surprisingly critical of the Iraq war.

By contrast, Steven Weber and Michael Zielenziger argue that the project to maintain American supremacy through unilateral "democracy promotion" is fatally flawed. The next president faces a world more hostile to U.S. interests and global trade, with burgeoning populations of international youth whose image of America is Abu Ghraib, not the Normandy landing. A new administration, they say, also must recognize the rising power of China and engage, rather than attempt to overpower, this country of 1.3 billion people.

On the domestic front, the national debt that ballooned in the past eight years will certainly precipitate changes, economic, political, and even international, if, as some project, the dollar loses its position as the world’s central currency. Republicans added a Medicare drug benefit, but structural adjustments anticipating the boomer retirement cannot be put off easily by the next administration, nor can an energy policy that prepares us for less dependency on oil.

As veteran White House reporter Carl Cannon notes, in the squall of contemporary American politics, it can be difficult to focus on the future (page 20). But in talking to Berkeley researchers, Cannon also found that outlines of solutions to many of the nation’s problems are within reach, political will notwithstanding. The act of imagining the future itself can clarify issues and untangle partisan quarrels — skills that the next president will need in order to be successful on behalf of all of us.