NEW YORK, April 16 (UPI) -- Harry Truman predicted of his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, that: "He'll sit there all day saying do this, do that, and nothing will happen. Poor Ike -- it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating."
In truth, Eisenhower proved to be shrewder in his awareness of the limits of presidential power than Truman had predicted.
But Truman's words explain very well what has been happening to George W. Bush so far this month. For Bush, April has indeed been "the cruelest month."
America may indeed be the only superpower in the world, or whatever terms of superiority may be given to it, but being president of the United States, it turns out, still doesn't give Bush the power to get other nations to follow his orders.
In the Middle East Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and just about every other actor, most especially his "good friends," the Saudis, defied Bush's clearly expressed wishes. Sharon hasn't pulled his troops out, Arafat's people set off a suicide bomb the day Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in the Middle East, and the Saudis? Well, they rushed to support the Iraqis just four days after Vice President Dick Cheney's meeting with them.
That the Middle East is a quagmire is not a new discovery, and it was that argument which had convinced the Bush people to stay out of the area, and to criticize Clinton for spending too much time there.
Of course, the events of 9/11 brought the United States into the arena in force, but it seems that an American policy aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the mullahs in Iran was developed in isolation, and sprung on an unsuspecting world in the form of the "axis of evil" address earlier this year.
But, having made American intentions obvious and direct gave every incentive to all those with different ends in mind to derail American policy. Yasser Arafat succeeded in doing so. And now Colin Powell is stuck on this tar baby, forced there by Bush's own words as much as by anything else.
Whatever happens in the Middle East, it has always been an arena in which American power has been limited, and in which Americans have had to negotiate to get their way.
The more striking example of defiance of Bush's will this month got a lot less publicity in the home country.
That came in America's "home stamping grounds" of Latin America. There, a coup in Venezuela against the erratic leftist President Hugo Chavez, arranged with the near-open connivance of the American government, and with the support of those leading organs of "liberal opinion," The New York Times and the Washington Post, collapsed, not only from its own blunders, but in the face of the unanimous opposition of the Latin American nations.
It turned out that Latin Americans were more worried about the return of the precedent of national armies overturning democratically elected governments than they were with the many obvious problems of the Chavez regime.
Of course, the political overreach of the temporary succeeding Venezuelan regime, that overturned not only the president, but the congress, the judiciary, and the Constitution of 1999, as well as filling the government with only the most right-wing of its supporters, helped bring on its own downfall.
One can't help but think that the outcome in Venezuela was partly the price the U.S. government paid for staffing its own ranks with only the most right-wing advisors, who probably didn't offer the best advice to the Venezuelan conspirators.
And it is a pretty sure bet that the Bush administration hadn't spent a second thinking of what the reaction of the rest of Latin America to this coup might be.
This, after all, is the same administration that greeted the first visit of the German chancellor to its shores by leaving the Kyoto agreement on the day of his arrival.
It may well be true that the solipsism of the Bush administration, which has been a characteristic that differentiates it from the other post-World War II Republican administrations, reflects its support base in the United States, the coalition of big business and the religious right.
The latter group, of course, has no counterpart in any of the other advanced nations, and, indeed, is contemptuous of the irreligious societies of the other advanced nations. And, of course, the other advanced nations have the same hostility to them. The role of this group in policy-making is far larger than it was in previous administrations.
The only times that this administration has hesitated on any policy decision is when business and the right disagree.
When the two agree, this administration cares not a whit what anyone else in the United States or the world might think. Of course, this policy tends to arouse foreign and domestic opposition on many issues.
In Latin America, their interests don't clash much, but in the Middle East, the two have different horses to ride. The right loves Israel and Ariel Sharon, while business loves Saudi Arabia.
The incoherence of America's Middle Eastern policy on a day-to-day basis can be explained by the difficulty of trying to ride the ill-matched horses of Sharon and the Wahabi dynasty, which are, to put it mildly, on different courses.
President Bush tried to overcome the incoherence of American policy by an act of will, acting as though stating his desires would be enough to get other nations to act upon them.
Perhaps no one except the president himself and the complaisant American media was surprised that nothing happened.
As Richard Neustadt pointed out four decades ago, the power of the presidency is negotiation, not command. And America's overwhelming military superiority turns out not to make as much difference as everyone thought it would.
As Napoleon said two centuries ago, "You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it." Since the American bayonet can only be unsheathed so many times, America's unique military superiority doesn't affect regional calculations, let alone national ones.
"All politics is local," quoth Tip O'Neill, and its an irony of the Bush administration, which makes just about all of its own calculations on the basis of local American politics, that it is so often surprised to find that other national leaders do the same thing.
Bush said "Do this, do that," and nothing happened. Harry Truman was wrong about Ike, but his prediction seems to have come true half-a-century later.
