Cheney’s Legacy: The lasting impact on the world

Vice Presidents have remarkable latitude when it comes to foreign policy. In the United States, they are the principle diplomat and the highest ranking official to meet with and persuade other foreign leaders to come around on the American agenda. The power of a vice president was something that Dick Cheney understood very well while leading the 2000 Republican Vice President Search for George W. Bush. With his own deep resume of Wyoming’s congressman, White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defence, and CEO of Halliburton, he believed that he was best suited for the job. From his expansive experience of government service, he realised very early on that the executive branch is curtailed when it comes to military effectiveness. As early as the 1980s, Cheney argued for the need of “broad presidential powers as the efficient solution to quickly solve problems instead of waiting for approval from Congress.” The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed in another viewpoint where they included vesting clauses for each branch of government to have checks and balances in order to avoid a single person having too much power. Redefining how much power the president has over the military and expanding presidential power was one of Cheney’s last effects on the world today.

The New Yorker article from 30 April 2001 laid out a prescient vision in laying the groundwork of his foreign policy: “I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States—the World Trade towers bombing [1993], in New York. The threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.” Of course he is not some kind of oracle who could see into the future, but he was more than prepared to step into a leading role of how to shape the United States’s foreign policy after a world changing event. The execution of the War or Terror program has his fingerprints all over the doctrine and was the most significant advocate. Politico describes him insisting on “maximalist policies, backing the invasion of Iraq despite ambiguous evidence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program and favoring heightened surveillance and presidential secrecy at home. Temperamentally, too, Cheney displayed a seemingly newfound belligerence, bullying colleagues, scorning media critics — in one interview he called waterboarding detainees for national security purposes “a no-brainer” — and once, on the Senate floor, telling Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont ‘to go fuck himself’”. His ideology appears extreme when looking in the rear-view mirror but at a time of heightened uncertainty, many Americans were less likely to check the blind spots of how the War on Terror was impacting the rest of the world as well as the American reputation. 

Americans started to pay attention when they learned about what was happening in 2004 at the Abu Ghraib prison complex through intensely disturbing photographs. The next year, the Washington Post reported about what was happening at CIA Black Sites, where they used “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners. This included many examples of what the Geneva Convention calls torture but these actions were vehemently defended by Cheney. The website Factcheck.org explains in detail how Cheney drafted memos and used the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to shape how prisoners would be treated inside these detention centres in the name of American homeland security. The reputation of America as a moral authority or a leader of integrity went right out of the window with Cheney’s decision and stalwart defense to manipulate the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.

Decades of war in the Middle East have had profound repercussions with large numbers of civilian deaths, mass migration, the rise of extremist groups such as ISIS, and the complete destabilisation of many countries. We can attribute many of these issues as a direct result of Cheney’s War of Terror and in 2024, when he endorsed Kamala Harris for president, many people seem to have forgotten what he implemented twenty years earlier. Here is a reminder from AlJazeera’s Ziyad Motala:

“portraying him as a defender of democracy, as if the destabilising effects of his policies were somehow a lesser evil. The truth is that while Trump’s brand of populist nationalism has damaged the social fabric of the United States, the neoconservative project Cheney helped lead caused immense human suffering on a global scale – far beyond anything Trump has”.

Mission Accomplished.