Bush foreign forays remembered fondly

Historians will measure the presidency of George HW Bush in familiar ways – by how well or poorly he managed the major domestic and international challenges of his time, his leadership qualities, the moral and social legacies he left for future generations.

Bush’s tenure was shorter than he had hoped, and ended ingloriously in a lopsided defeat at the hands of an upstart governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. What Bush had impatiently dismissed as ‘‘the vision thing’’ – in an interview in 1987 – turned out to be precisely what the voters found missing in him. Even after four years as president and a quarter-century in public life, he seemed to many Americans a distant and diffident figure, a caretaker without strong purpose or strategy.

Foreign policy was Bush’s great strength, and of his diplomatic contributions, two stand out. One was to keep America and the Soviet Union moving forward along a path to peace charted by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a path that in time led to the end of the Cold War. His second big achievement was the skilful orchestration over many months of a collective global response to Iraq’s aggression in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps, in a second term, Bush might have found a clearer sense of direction on domestic issues. But if he is measured by his leadership and choices on the global stage, historians will almost certainly treat him more kindly than voters did in 1992.