Jeb Bush kicks off European tour
BERLIN – Jeb Bush, hoping to polish his foreign policy credentials before he formally announces a White House bid, launched a three-nation trip to Europe on Tuesday by lauding his father’s role in the reunification of Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
“The unification, as you all know, was not inevitable,” the former Republican governor of Florida told more than 2,000 people at a major economic conference here. “Many doubted it.”
With his father’s support, “Germany is whole and Germany is free,” Bush said as the crowd heartily applauded.
He didn’t mention his younger brother, former President George W. Bush, in a 30-minute speech.
The disparate treatment is a reflection of the political thicket Bush faces as he prepares to kick off his campaign Monday. Whereas his father, George H.W. Bush, and his one-term presidency are remembered fondly, his brother was deeply unpopular in much of Europe, as well as at home, by the time he left office in 2009.
Bush’s speech at Wirtschaftsrat, the annual conference of the Economic Council of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, was his first public event on a five-day trip to Germany, Poland and Estonia.
He used it to stake out a muscular foreign policy well within mainstream Republican views.
Bush called for an aggressive stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and took aim at the Obama administration’s foreign and fiscal policies, even as he in effect embraced some of them.
“We’re beginning to realize the reset button didn’t turn out so hot,” Bush said, referring to the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposed “reset” of diplomatic relations with Moscow in 2009. Putin was then prime minister under Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Relations have soured steadily since Putin, who had previously served as president, was re-elected in 2012. Russian military forces have backed pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Putin’s policies are stoking concerns in Eastern Europe that he may try to go further.
But Bush was careful to avoid suggesting that the United States should intervene unilaterally, saying the responsibility for regional defense lies with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a policy that the White House has endorsed. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but Poland and Estonia are.
Putin, Bush said, “will push until someone pushes back, and I believe that is NATO’s responsibility.”
President Barack Obama and the leaders of six other major industrialized countries agreed Monday to toughen sanctions on Russia, if necessary, to press for a political solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
At the G-7 summit in southern Germany, the leaders said sanctions will remain in place until Russia helps to fully implement a peace plan reached in February in Minsk, Belarus.