This Article is From Jun 13, 2015

Bush Distances Himself From Brother In Europe

Bush Distances Himself From Brother In Europe

File picture of US Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush. (Agence France-Presse)

Berlin: After emerging from a 45-minute meeting here with Jeb Bush, the foreign minister of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told colleagues that what struck him most about the American was not the strength of his opinions but something simpler: the depth of his curiosity.

Bush, who will declare his candidacy for president Monday in Florida, had impressed Steinmeier, a veteran of European policy and diplomacy, with a wide range of pointed questions about the Middle East, Ukraine and Greece. It was, declared a German official involved, "a broad tour d'horizon."

When Bush's brother George first ran for president, he erroneously referred to Greeks as "Grecians," flubbed the name of India's president and confused Slovenia with Slovakia, offering the world an unabashed portrait of provinciality.

But across Europe this week, Jeb Bush revealed himself to be a very different kind of Bush: well traveled, almost encyclopedically knowledgeable about foreign countries, and possessing the genuine inquisitiveness his brother had so notably lacked.

In many ways, the impressions are superficial. Bush is now six months into a seemingly perpetual noncandidacy that has allowed him to forestall the kind of detailed plans that might disappoint allies, domestic or foreign. In Europe this week, he refused to offer specific answers to some of the most urgent problems facing the countries he visited, repeatedly saying that he was not yet a candidate.

Yet Bush has benefited from comparisons to the foreign travels of Republican rivals like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who breezed through Israel without public events or tough questions. Bush crafted his tour here around his fluency in foreign affairs, holding news conferences in every country he visited.

But as he prepares to declare his White House bid, Bush's trip here has been a reminder that his attempt to escape the shadow of his older brother, as awkward and halting as it may be, is not just a political strategy. It reflects how dissimilar the two men really are, in temperament, interests and preparation.

In Warsaw, Poland, after Bush sat through a dense presentation about microeconomic reform in neighboring Ukraine, he asked his hosts: What was the country's retirement age?

The answer was unusually young: 60.

"Very astute," said Marcin Zaborowski, who was recently appointed to direct the Warsaw office of the Center for European Policy Analysis, who attended the meeting with Bush. "Because that is very much an issue in Ukraine."

Bush went on to inquire about the pace of government decentralization in Ukraine - which, he observed, had ceded little decision-making authority to its localities, according to those in the room. His larger point: A stagnant Ukraine, unwilling to modernize economically and politically, would be harder to defend from Russian aggression.

Foreign trips by American politicians can take on a robotic quality - a predictable wreath laying here, a perfunctory meeting with a minister there. But Bush seemed to surprise his hosts with the breadth of his studies and queries, according to foreign officials who participated in his closed-door meetings in Germany, Poland and Estonia. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the conversations.

During a tour of the Warsaw Uprising museum, dedicated to the city's unsuccessful resistance against its Nazi occupiers in 1944, Bush observed that the city's location, between Germany and Russia, was its "biggest curse," recalled Jan Oldakowski, the museum's director. After watching a film at the museum about the depth of destruction in Warsaw during World War II, Bush told Oldakowski that the United States could not tolerate further Russian incursions into former Soviet-bloc nations "because it was this city, Warsaw, that was at stake."

Oldakowski said he was struck by Bush's decision to linger inside the museum for an hour, asking about the tactics of the Warsaw Uprising, the long-term impacts of German and Soviet occupation and modern Poland's standing in Europe.

"It was clear that he wanted to learn about that," Oldakowski said, "so that later when he was meeting with the president or foreign minister he wouldn't appear insensitive about any issue or make some faux pas."

In his one-on-one sessions with the members of the Polish Cabinet, Bush seemed to go out of his way to dispel the American reputation for know-it-all-ness.

"What's on your mind?" he asked. "What's on your agenda?" (More often than not, said those briefed on the conversations, the answer was President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.)

And he asked leaders in Germany and Poland about what type of military hardware, if any, they might supply to Ukraine as it tries to beat back Russian territorial ambitions.

He wasn't there, an adviser said, "to tell them what was on his mind."

In the years since he left the Florida governor's office in 2007, Bush has traveled widely as a businessman, making 89 trips to 22 countries, an itinerary that dwarfs that of his brother when he ran for president in 2000.

Unlike the gaffe-prone former president, who referred to Africa as a nation during his first trip overseas after moving into the White House, the younger Bush crisscrossed Europe without a public blunder.

His hosts politely noted the contrast. Well aware of George W. Bush's reputation, Zaborowski, the Polish expert, said that it "definitely does not match my impression of his brother, who seemed extremely curious about local government and policy and very well informed."

Oddly enough, Jeb Bush's biggest self-inflicted wounds on the campaign trail in the United States have involved the two spheres that he handled so nimbly in Europe this week: foreign affairs and his brother. It took him an agonizingly long time to acknowledge that, given what is known now, it was a mistake for President Bush to have invaded Iraq in 2003. It was a case of brotherly love that extracted a steep political cost.

Yet in Berlin a few days ago, Jeb Bush deftly navigated his family ties. In a speech to Germany's center-right Christian Democrats, he repeatedly invoked his father, the elder President George Bush, a popular figure in Germany for his unwavering support of reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but made no mention of his brother, reviled there for the invasion of Iraq and American interrogation tactics after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

An article in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel offered a tart assessment of the trip: "Bush III is modeling himself after Bush I" rather than Bush II.
 
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