Saturday, November 08, 2008
Looking backward: Defining the Bush doctrine
Looking backward, perhaps the point of tedium, regular readers will recall Charlie Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin shortly after her nomination, and her purported failure to know what the "Bush doctrine" was. It was all very funny for partisans of the left, especially Gibson's condescending implication that only an idiot does not know what the Bush doctrine is. Gibson:
The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a pre-emptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.
This was silly at the time, insofar as there probably has never been an American president who did not hold the same opinion expressed literally this way. I suspect that on January 21, at least, even President Barack Obama will not be willing to repudiate something very much like the Gibson doctrine.
In any case, I did not suddenly think that the afternoon of November 8 was a great time to defend Sarah Palin. No, I had stumbled across a five year-old issue of Political Science Quarterly while rummaging through boxes of books in our basement, which issue contains an article titled "Understanding the Bush Doctrine" by Columbia professor and international affairs giant Robert Jervis. His definition involves a bit more than Gibson's, and is worth remembering for better or worse as we watch Barack Obama's vision of American national interest blossom in the coming months:
The doctrine has four elements: a strong belief in the importance of a state's domestic regime in determining its foreign policy and the related judgment that this is an opportune time to transform international politics; the perception of great threats that can be defeated only by new and vigorous policies, most notably preventive war; a willingness to act unilaterally when necessary; and, as both a cause and a summary of these beliefs, an overriding sense that peace and stability require the United States to assert its primacy in world politics.
If I were to venture a prediction as to Barack Obama's view of these four elements, I suspect that he would say (1) that a state's domestic regime does heavily influence its foreign policy, but that now is not an opportune time to transform international politics; (2) that the transnational terrorism that so animated the Bush administration is not a particularly greater threat than others of a more conventional nature, and that in any case preventive war is overrated as a means for dealing with it; (3) that he, too, is willing to act unilaterally when necessary, but that he defines "necessary" quite differently; and (4) that he agrees that peace and stability depend on the United States to assert its primacy in world politics, but that the Bush administration has not actually pursued peace and stability.
On that last point, I believe that Jervis missed the point. While the geopolitical objective of the Bush administration was certainly the sort of "peace" that is obtained through victory, there is no evidence that it regarded "stability" as an important value. Indeed, a couple of years after Jervis published his article, both Bush and Condoleezza Rice made it very clear that they regarded our longstanding support for "stability" in the Middle East (by indulging the dictatorships in the region) as having sewn the seeds of Islamic radicalism. The "democratization strategy," which did not go nearly far enough, was about hope and change, not stability. Indeed, many of us regard the Bush administration's abandonment of the program for political reform in the Arab Muslim world as one of the great disappointments of his administration's latter years.
So, we now see the obvious question: Will Barack Obama's foreign policy in the region be about hope and change for the people there, or only for the people here?
Labels: Obamenigma
2 Comments:
By 
K. Pablo, at
Sun Nov 09, 08:49:00 AM:
George Friedman, writing in a recent Geopolitical Diary: "one of Stratfor’s key contentions, (which) is that ideology and personalities are of secondary importance to the external forces that limit, shape and constrain a leader’s options."
I think Obama, if he has any shred of the intelligence people attribute to him, will soon see this principle at work. He has constrained his options by indulging the excesses of the pacifist left and allowing them to project their expectations onto his vapid blank slate. As Joe Biden warned, the left now has to "gird its loins" when geopolitical reality sets in.
The question to me is, how much of his political capital is Obama willing to expend from his political base? Or will he apply his considerable communication skills in persuading his base that their pacifism is the worst kind of fantasy?
By 
, at
Sun Nov 09, 04:12:00 PM:
As I see it, the illiberal far left is now allied with the paleo-conservatives in direct opposition of "hope and change".
Meanwhile the neo-cons would gladly support Obama if he truly stood for the same.
This country is screwed up, if not in fact screwed.
