The Western European countries had their own issues. Muslims were a much higher percentage of the population in many European countries than in America, running 5-10% in some countries. They generally hadn't done well assimilating into the local culture, and were generally not appreciated. France had Algerians, Italy had Libyans and Tunisians, Germany had Turkish nationals, some were there illegally, some were on work visas, some had overstayed their visas. It was very messy. Furthermore, it was very easy to say that we shouldn't sell Muslim countries weapons, but weapons manufacturing was a very high profit business and very competitive. France was going to sell the Arabs planes and ships and such, no matter what they might promise publicly.
On the other hand, some form of containment had some real benefits, both in terms of lives lost and dollars spent. The locals might not like us occasionally bombing them when they started getting too big for their britches, but they really didn't like us when we landed on their doorstep. Forget about picking sides in the local version of a civil war! The Sunnis hated the Shiites, the moderates hated the radicals, the Muslims hated the Christians and the Jews, but everybody hated foreign invaders! Unless you embraced Genghis Khan's solution to the problem when the Tartars rebelled against him, in which he lined the entire Tartar nation up in a line and slit the throats of everybody over the height of a cart handle, you would never get anybody to go along with you.
This was the total antithesis of the neocons battle cry. We needed to go into these countries forcibly, throw out the dictators, hand them the Constitution (suitably translated, of course), and install free elections and a two party democratic system. Never mind that nobody in most of these places understood the idea of an election. Never mind that 40% of the population in some countries was illiterate and couldn't even read a ballot, let alone understand it. Never mind that women were still considered property and that in some of these shitholes they still had slavery in place. America was a burning flame of freedom, and if some of these places got singed, so be it! Once one of them fell in a quick and glorious and cheap campaign, the neighbors would immediately understand the wonders that we had brought, and overthrow their leaders to get in on the freedom.
We spent ten years, tens of thousands of casualties, and trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all we did was piss off a huge part of the world. We certainly didn't bring democracy to these places; both ended up in civil war. My thought? They hate us already! We don't need to invade them to piss them off. They're already pissed at us. Let the bastards rot. It's cheaper.
I knew it was more complicated than that. We couldn't embargo dozens of countries. We would still get drawn into fights, much like we had to just do in Afghanistan, and what we were still doing with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We were going to need to keep armed forces around the world. However, the mix and locations needed to change. Our military was one that was designed to face off against the Soviet Union. It was very high tech and very expensive – much too expensive to use against raghead assholes. We didn't need invisible fighters and bombers, but we did need tankers and cargo planes. We didn't need multi-billion dollar destroyers, but we did need some corvettes and frigates to do convoy duty and antipiracy patrols. We didn't need self-propelled push button one man howitzers, but we did need commandos and high quality infantry.
Force locations were in the same fix. Why were we defending the German border when the Iron Curtain had rusted to pieces? Why were we involved in Bosnia, when it was right next door to NATO? We needed to pivot our forces from Europe to Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. We needed new alliances, and to reformulate old ones.
It was complicated and sophisticated, not an approach suitable for sound bites and political grandstanding. Worse, while I understood the costs of a failed approach, having seen it originally, I knew that others wouldn't believe me. Besides, what if I was wrong? No matter how smart I was, if terrorists managed to make another spectacular strike, the nation would put boots on the ground somewhere, and I wouldn't be able to stop it. We were going to have to play smarter than ever before.
I discussed these ideas with both Tony Blair and, a few days later in Paris, Jacques Chirac. The results were fairly predictable. Britain thought I had a good idea. France would give it some thought, but they were smarter than us (and everybody else, too.) Neither wanted to invade anybody, though both had capabilities to do so, at least nearby in Africa and in Europe. Both lied through their teeth about limiting arms sales.
Otherwise, the trips to Britain and France were fairly successful. Neither Marilyn nor I insulted anybody or spilled soup on the Queen. We said nice things about the British and the French, and didn't stick our noses in any sort of local politics. We took boat rides on the Thames and the Seine, and got to see the Eiffel Tower. There was a huge amount of residual sympathy from the devastation of 9-11, and since we had stopped our campaign in Afghanistan before we left home, that wasn't an issue. France was surprisingly sophisticated regarding that, since they had done similar things with the French Foreign Legion over the years. Yes, there really is a French Foreign Legion, and they are as tough a bunch of bastards as you are likely to find. I had seen a few of their officers once while I was in the 82nd, when they were doing some cross training and familiarization. The Frogs used them as expendable mercenaries in all sorts of shitholes.
So, anyway, London and Paris went okay. In a lot of ways it was simply a chance for the old pros to get to meet the new kid on the block. He was different than the last kid who lived in that house across the street, but he looked like he would be there awhile. Even if we didn't solve the problems of the world, I thought we had accomplished something, and Colin Powell indicated that I hadn't stepped on my crank. And besides, if I ever started thinking that living in the White House was like living in a museum, all I needed to remember was that little side trip through Buckingham Palace. There are some fascinating things that never make it into the usual tour itinerary! Amazing place!
Russia was a more interesting trip. Vladimir Putin was Russia's latest strong man, and even though they had nominally embraced democracy, it was a thin embrace. All of the pre-trip briefings had stressed that it was a nation of contradictions. They rejected communism but preferred a strong ruler. The Russian Mafia vied with billionaire oligarchs to control the economy, so you had a kleptocracy challenging a plutocracy. Parts of the country were modern, parts were Third World, and the only reason anybody feared them was that they had nukes. I remember how my parents visited there on my first time through, and my dad came back and told me about the trip. His comment? "Why in the world were we afraid of them for fifty years?! They're broke!"
Part of Putin's political calculus was to use foreign affairs to deflect the public's attention from domestic problems, a surprisingly common tactic around the world. In this he was aided by the fact that the Russian economy was just starting to rebuild after the economic collapse of the '90s. Both he and Russia were feeling stronger.
So far, Bush had simply been tossing around ideas and talking about the need to 'rein in' Russia, but we hadn't really done anything yet. We had brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czechs into NATO during the Clinton years, but so far we had just been talking about bringing in the rest of Eastern Europe. I knew once we did that, the Russians would begin treating us as hostile again, which would only be exacerbated when we started moving Patriot anti-missile batteries towards the Russian border. I could see no possible reason to piss them off just for the sake of pissing them off.