article

The Bush Doctrine refers to a set of foreign policy guidelines first unveiled by President George W. Bush in his commencement speech speech to the graduating class of West Point given on June 1, 2002. The policies, taken together, outlined a broad new phase in US policy that would place greater emphasis on military pre-emption, military superiority ("strength beyond challenge"), unilateral action, and a committment to "extending democracy, liberty, and security to all regions". The policy was formalized in a document titled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published on September 20, 2002. The Bush Doctrine is a marked departure from the policies of deterrence and containment that generally characterized American foreign policy during the Cold War and the decade between the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11.

The Bush Doctrine provided the policy framework for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which occurred without United Nations sanctions or as a result of military provocations by Iraq.

Initial formulation: No distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them

The term "Bush Doctrine" initially referred to the policy formulation stated by President Bush immediately after the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack that the U.S. would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". The immediate application of this policy was the invasion of Afghanistan in early October 2001. Although the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan offered to hand over al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden if they were shown proof that he was responsible for September 11 attacks and also offered to extradite bin Laden to Pakistan where he would be tried under Islamic law, their refusal to extradite him to the U.S. with no preconditions was considered justification for invasion. This policy implies that any nation that does not take a pro-active stance against terrorism would be seen as supporting it. On September 20, 2001, in a televised address to a joint session of Congress, Bush summed up this policy with the words, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Broader formulation: a muscular foreign policy

Unlike the initial "harboring terrorist" formulation of September 2001, which clarified rather than altered long-standing U.S. policy, the new statements marked a major shift in U.S. foreign policy. The new policy was fully delineated in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States issued on September 20, 2002 *. It included these elements:

Preemption

  • A policy of preventive war, should the US or its allies be threatened by terrorists or by rogue states that are engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction
  • The right of self-defense should be extended in order to authorize pre-emptive attacks against potential aggressors cutting them off before they are able to launch strikes against the US.

Unilateralism

  • The duty of the US to pursue unilateral military action when acceptable multilateral solutions cannot be found.

Strength Beyond Challenge

  • The policy that "United States has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge", indicating the US intends to take actions as necessary to continue its status as the world's sole military superpower. This resembles a British Empire policy before World War I that their navy must be larger than the world's next two largest navies put together.

Extending Democracy, Liberty, and Security to All Regions

  • A policy of actively promoting democracy and freedom in all regions of the world. Bush declared at West Point, "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves -- safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life."

Roots of the Bush Doctrine

Paul Wolfowitz and the Defense Planning Guidance text of 1992

Tracing the history of the doctrine back through the Department of Defense it appears the first full explication of the doctrine was the initial "final draft" version of the internal Defense Planning Guidance guidelines written by Paul Wolfowitz, then in the role of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in 1992. When the guidelines, commonly termed the Wolfowitz Doctrine, were leaked to the press and a controversy arose, the George H. W. Bush White House ordered it re-written. The revised version did not mention pre-emption or unilateralism.

The debate within the Bush administration

In the months following September 11th two distinct schools of thought arose in the Bush Administration regarding the critical policy question of how to handle potentially dangerous countries such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea ("Axis of Evil" states). Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, as well as US Department of State specialists, argued for what was essentially the continuation of existing US foreign policy. These policies, developed during the long years of the Cold War, sought to establish a multilateral consensus for action (which would likely take the form of increasingly harsh sanctions against the problem states, summarized as the policy of containment). The opposing view, argued by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a number of influential Department of Defense policy makers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, held that direct and unilateral action was both possible and justified and that America should embrace the opportunities for democracy and security offered by its position as sole remaining superpower.

President Bush ultimately sided with the Department of Defense camp (also described as the neoconservatives), and their recommendations form the basis for the Bush Doctrine.

Comparison with previous US foreign policy

A doctrine permitting preventive war can be seen as a change from the practice of limiting preemptive strikes to the destruction of specific targets as a means of self-defense, and from focusing on the doctrine of deterrence (for instance, the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction).

Preemptive military action to destroy specific targets, short of war, has long been a part of American practice. The Bush Administration, in its September 2002 National Security Strategypaper wrote, “The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security.” The unilateral US blockade and boarding of Cuban vessels during the Cuban Missile Crisis[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/04/opinion/04BOOT.html?todaysheadlines was a limited use of pre-emptive military force, as were the attack on Somali leader Mohamed Farah Aidid’s meeting-place in Mogadishu in 1993; four days of US bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998; and the cruise-missile destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in August 1998, which was at that time thought to be in the control or service of Osama bin Laden. Many argue that these preemptive ideas stem back to President John Quincy Adams, who had General Andrew Jackson lead a strike on (and kill) many natives, escaped slaves, and two British citizens in the Florida territory.

While previous preemptive actions have been justified on the basis that the threat was imminent, the Bush Administration's view, as stated in the strategy paper* is that "military preemption" is legitimate when the threat is "emerging" or "sufficient," "even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

Supporters of the Bush Doctrine argue that the previous policy of deterrence assumes that a potential enemy is a coherent and rational state that would not launch an attack that would likely result in its own destruction, the core of the concept of mutually assured destruction, which helped keep an uneasy peace between the US and the Soviet Union for more than four decades after World War II. The Bush Doctrine takes the view that the potential results of the use of a weapon of mass destruction are so grave that preemption is warranted, especially when such weapons could be acquired by hostile armed groups "whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness".

The Bush Doctrine is seen by advocates as an appropriate response to revised concepts of asymmetric warfare, in which a militarily inferior power or an insurgent movement claims the right to use normally prohibited tactics, such as attacks on civilian targets and other actions prohibited by the laws of war, while assuming that the superior power will still be bound by them.

With respect to the 2003 War in Iraq, a pre-emptive strike was launched, leading to argument over whether the strike was more of a preventive war than a pre-emptive attack.

Implications of the UN Charter for the Bush Doctrine

Critics of the Bush doctrine argue that the United Nations Charter has been ratified by the United States, thereby making it a treaty binding of the US government as domestic law. Therefore, they say, the doctrine is in violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter, which states, "All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."

Supporters of the doctrine quote Article 1 of the UN Charter: "To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace."

Critics note the use of the term "collective measures" invalidates this defense of the doctrine. Further, they claim, the United Nations is not a world government, the US is a sovereign nation with a Constitution that specifies the war powers of both the President and the Congress and is the supreme law of the US. As Article 2 of the UN Charter states: "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."

With particular regard to the Iraq War, both supporters and critics find further support in Article 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, which lay out the gradual approach to "threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression."

Article 42 states that should the peaceful sanctions provided for by Article 41 be "inadequate or proven to be inadequate", the Security Council may authorize the use of military force. Critics contend that, since no Security Council Resolution authorized the use of force against Iraq, article 42 cannot be used to give legitimacy to the war. Critics further claim that, under Article 51, the exercise of the right of self-defense is the only situation in which Member States have the right to engage in war without a mandate from the Security Council. Only in that specific case is unilateral action accepted by the Charter, and even in that situation the Member State has the duty to report the actions it has taken to the Security Council. This is one of the chief arguments of the critics of the Bush Government against the legality of a "pre-emptive war".

However, supporters claim that no new Security Council resolution was needed, and that the war was legal under the Security Council resolutions passed during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. They claim that, having the Saddam Hussein regime violated not only the conditions of the ceasefire that put an end to that conflict, but also several resolutions passed by the Security Council in the postwar period, that the use of force became automatically justified under the original resolution that allowed for the use of force.

Criticisms of the Bush Doctrine

There are many who criticize the Bush Doctrine, suspicious of the increasing willingness of the US to use military force unilaterally. Critics believe that requiring any country (including the United States) to obtain international support before undertaking offensive military action is necessary to prevent the escalation of conflicts and the dominance of one nation over others.

In addition, many criticisms have arisen around the doctrine's assertion that the United States will never allow any potential adversary -- a term which is unlikely to exclude many states -- to develop the military capability of challenging the US as the world's sole superpower.

This doctrine is argued to be contrary to the Just War Theory. Though the classical formulation envisages causes other than that of a defensive war, many theorists today are extremely reluctant to accept any cause other than a defensive war as satisfying its criteria.

The main argument against these criticisms is that the doctrine is concerned only with self-defence, but is simply re-interpreting the acceptable time horizon for a perceived threat. In other words the threat does not need to be imminent before self-defensive actions can be performed. Yet this is a dangerous change since it means that the doctrine can be used to justify any invasion of any sort under a vail of pre-emptive strike *.

The Bush Doctrine has also been criticized for its purported "active promotion of democracy and freedom," as the United States deals with oppressive dictators on a regular basis. This includes the United States' most populous trading partner, with "most favoured nation" status, the People's Republic of China, a Communist nation which most in the West feel to have an unfree and abusive government. The Bush Doctrine, has, thus far, only been applied to certain countries: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Also, many critics have noted the similarity between the countries in the Axis of Evil, and the goals of the conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century, which supports and advocates the dominance of world affairs by the United States — and many in the Bush Administration are, or have been, involved in the PNAC.

Historical critics of preventive war (although obviously not in the context of the Bush Doctrine) include former US President Abraham Lincoln. In an 1848 letter to his law partner, William Herndon, Lincoln criticized then US President Polk's preventive war against Mexico:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.... If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us," but he will say to you, "Be silent; I see it, if you don't."
Abraham Lincoln

See also

External links

Books

  • Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, New York & London, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0195173384
  • Bennett, William J. Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, New York, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003. ISBN 0385506805
  • Dolan, Chris J. In War We Trust: The Bush Doctrine And The Pursuit Of Just War, Burlington, VA, Ashgate, 2005. ISBN 0754642348
  • Dolan, Chris J. and Betty Glad (eds.) Striking First: The Preventive War Doctrine and the Reshaping of U.S. Foreign Policy, New York & London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 140396548X
  • Donnelly, Thomas The Military We Need: The Defense Requirements of the Bush Doctrine, Washington, D.C., American Enterprise Institute Press, 2005. ISBN 0844742295
  • Gaddis, John Lewis Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0674011740
  • Grandin, Greg, "Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism," New York, Metropolitan Press, 2006.
  • Hayes, Stephen S. The Brain: Paul Wolfowitz and the Making of the Bush Doctrine, New York, HarperCollins, Forthcoming (2007?). ISBN 0060723467
  • Kaplan, Lawrence and William Kristol The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2003. ISBN 1893554694
  • Smith, Grant F. Deadly Dogma, Washington, DC, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2006. ISBN 0976443740
  • Tremblay, Rodrigue, The New American Empire, Infinity, 2004, ISBN 0741418878
  • Woodward, Bob Plan of Attack, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004. ISBN 074325547X

Foreign policy doctrines | George W. Bush | History of foreign relations of the United States

National Security Strategy | Doktrino de Bush | Doctrine Bush | Bushdoctrine

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Bush Doctrine".

Home Page • arts • business • computers • games • health • hospitals • home • kids & teens • news • physicians • recreation• reference • regional • science • shopping • society • sports • world