The election that could have changed the world in 2023

Ninety-two-year-old James A. Baker is among America’s most distinguished statesmen. His most significant appointments were as President Reagan’s Treasury secretary and chief of staff and President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state and closest confidante. Baker also led the legal team in the 2000 election that halted the Florida recount, awarding Bush’s son Florida’s Electoral College votes and the White House.

Among our presidents, no other, including Eisenhower, had a resume comparable to George H.W. Bush. Bush had been CIA director; a member of Congress; ambassador to China and the United Nations; and one of the Navy’s youngest fighter pilots in World War II, where who won a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. And he had been Reagan’s vice president for eight years. 

With those qualifications and a brilliant first term, I wonder what Baker might consider the global consequences of Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in 1992. Suppose Bush had won and had gotten four more years. Would today’s world be different?

Bush presided over arguably the greatest peaceful transformation of the 20th century: the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. The Bush team was superb. Baker was at State. General Brent Scowcroft was serving for the second time as national security advisor. A youngish Dick Cheney was at the Pentagon. General Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert Gates, took over the CIA in 1991. That was a formidable team. 

And that team had just pulled off Desert Storm, driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and crushing Iraq’s army in a mere 100 hours, restoring the reputation of the U.S. military in perhaps the most lopsided campaign in history.

Bush wisely chose not to march to Baghdad. In foreign policy, the Bush administration managed and guided the transition of former East European Warsaw Pact states under Moscow’s control to nations that are now free and independent. The magnitude of that achievement has too often been undervalued. Bush also put in place an economic plan that, after he left office, drove the recovery for which the Clinton administration received credit.

Baker’s argument, I believe, would go like this. A second Bush term would have made 2023 far, far better. Instead of wrongly assuming that China could become more Western in character, Bush understood that would not happen, certainly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A more pragmatic long-term policy would have been put in place. And the fear of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan today would be a non-issue.

Similarly, Bush and his advisors would have been more cautious about NATO expansion. Bush initially favored providing Russia more financial aid. He also understood that Russia’s history and ego could not be dismissed. All this is not idle speculation. Bush spells it out in detail in “A World Transformed,” coauthored with Scowcroft. Whether Bush could have achieved his aims is unknowable. But had he, Russia might not have invaded Ukraine.

If Bush had won in 1992, perhaps George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden would not have been elected president. It likewise is unknowable who might have run in 1996 after a Bush second term. Would Sept. 11 have occurred? And had George W. Bush not been president, would the U.S. have invaded in Iraq in 2003 over weapons of destruction that did not exist?

While this imaginary excursion into the land of “what ifs” is simply that, the success of Bush’s only term at least suggests that today’s world could not have been worse off had he won. 

Still, Bush lost. The reason was businessman Ross Perot, with his ubiquitous charts showing America was in economic extremis. Perot, with Medal of Honor winner Vice Admiral James Stockdale as his running mate, took 19 percent of the vote. Today, no one on the horizon has the same background and experience Bush brought to the office, not even President Biden with 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president. Fortunately, no current-day Ross Perot is likely to tip the 2024 election running as an independent.

Of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin could have been impervious to a second Bush term and resistant to any improvement in U.S.-Russian relations even if NATO had not so greatly expanded eastward. Chinese President Xi Jinping could still have considered America as antithetical to a vibrant China. Yet, suppose Bush had won?

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of “shock and awe.” His latest  book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.” Follow him on Twitter @harlankullman.