Tom Farer

Tom Farer a former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and of the University of New Mexico, is now Professor of Law and International Relations at the American University, Washington DC. His most recent book is The Grand Strategy of the United States in Latin America.

Bush’s Choice

Tom Farer, 12 October 1989

In the early months of George Bush’s Presidency, before his reassuringly innocuous pronouncements and prudent compromises at the Nato summit had allowed the American media to discover prophetic qualities in him, editorial pages were much occupied by pundits clashing over what Bush, during the electoral campaign, had plaintively labelled ‘the vision thing’. Despite the country’s considerable domestic difficulties – some of which are on daily display in violent, drug-drenched streets within jogging distance of the White House – the President’s critics were aroused primarily by an alleged absence of vision about an exterior world whose familiar contours were melting into odd and unsettling forms.’

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