THE FUTURE OF THE BUSH DOCTRINE – PREEMPTION AND THE ELITES

Much hash has been made over the Bush Doctrine of preemption, which flows out of the tenets of the new National Security Strategy of the United States. Even more has been made of the ” Neocons” who helped craft some aspects of this new strategy, some of which is valid and some being sinister, conspiracy-theory nonsense of embittered partisans. The actual employment of American power for “preemption” in a military sense was owed more to the terror attacks of 9-11 and the unsolved dilemma of Saddam Hussein than to the abstract musings of policy wonks. The strategy itself has been more multifaceted than it is usually given credit for -or for that matter- the unidimensional way some of the “neocon” officials may have tactically implemented it in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many critics of the Bush administration actually prefer movement toward a transnational-progressive foreign policy for the United States with a value system for international affairs far closer to that of the core EU states of France and Germany. International Law, if some of the critics ruled, would be interpreted and extrapolated in novel ways to find the greatest restrictions possible on ” unilateral” use of American power. Action, if no alternatives to force can be found, would be only possible after a slow process of diplomatic consensus and sanction by the United Nations. In other words, much like we saw in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990’s – except more so.

While much of the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment runs on a continuum between these two positions, with a majority closer to transnational-progressivism than to neoconservatism, there has not been such a stark choice of competing visions in over fifty years. I would argue that you would have to go back to George Kennan’s ” X” article and NSC-68 and the resultant criticisms made by Walter Lippmann and Robert Taft to find so wide a gulf within elite American opinion. The question is, “Why ?”. Why the deep division now when the United States, even with Iraq and the War on terror, stands at the brink of full-spectrum dominance ? Why is there a general sense that the stakes are high ?

I have a simple explanation. The magnitude of change in world affairs is such that there is a considerable and increasing divergence between ” rules of the game” conceived in the aftermath of WWII and the early Cold War and the corresponding reality of nation-states as they exist and behave in 2004. This battle is actually a struggle within America’s elite to actually rewrite “the rules” to the degree which American influence can shape such a revision of the world order.

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