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[Michael Butler]

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The Bush doctrine, before and after
>By Francis Fukuyama
>Published: October 10 2005 20:13 | Last updated: October 10 2005 20:13
>>

The ³Bush doctrine², as elaborated by George W.?Bush in earlier speeches as
well as in the National Security Strategy of the United States in September
2002, was a logical and well thought-out response to the terrorist threat in
the wake of September 11, 2001. A senior Clinton administration official
once confided privately that in their eight years, the Clintonites never
managed to produce a strategy of comparable sophistication. Nonetheless, in
Mr Bush¹s second term, its key components lie in shambles. The doctrine is
unlikely to have a lasting impact on US foreign policy in future
administrations, Republican or Democrat.

The first aspect of the ³doctrine² concerned the pre-emptive use of force.
The NSS argued quite cogently that in the face of suicide terrorists armed
with weapons of mass destruction, deterrence and containment ­ the
centrepieces of cold war strategy ­ would not work and that the US needed,
as the president has repeatedly stated, to fight them ³over there² rather
than waiting for them to attack the American homeland.

Pre-emption, as John Lewis Gaddis has noted, is not a new idea in American
strategic thinking; it was used or considered at various times such as in
the Cuban missile crisis. What was innovative about the NSS was how it
collapsed the distinction between pre-emption (against an imminent attack)
and preventive war (in which the threat lay several months or years in the
future) and argued that the post 9/11 environment required the latter
against rogue state proliferators harbouring terrorists.

Under the right circumstances, it is impossible to make a normative case
against preventive war: if suicide terrorists with WMD are clearly planning
an attack on the US on the territory of another country, it is hard to argue
that America does not have the right to take matters into its own hands
rather than wait for United Nations Security Council permission to act. Even
the UN¹s High Level Panel on reform admitted as much. The problem is that,
in the real world, such conditions almost never exist. We seldom have good
information about our enemies¹ capabilities or reliable ways to predict
their future behaviour. Failure to find Iraqi WMD exposed the limits of US
intelligence capabilities. The Bush administration merged the terrorism/WMD
problem with the rogue state/proliferation problem in a way that skewed the
risk-reward calculation toward preventive war. The Iraq war showed that
traditional prudential strictures against preventive war (Bismarck once
called preventive war ³committing suicide for fear of death²) remain valid
even in an age of suicide terrorism.

The second dimension of the Bush doctrine has to do with its approach to
allies and legitimacy, also known as ³unilateralism². I do not believe that
most administration officials were contemptuous of global public opinion.
Many felt, however, that legitimacy had to be won ex post, rather than ex
ante via a Security Council resolution. Officials such as Donald Rumsfeld
believed, not unreasonably, that the collective action mechanisms of the UN
and of the Europeans were broken, as evidenced most recently in the Balkans
where only US leadership brought the Bosnian and Kosovar conflicts to a
close. In its own eyes, the Bush administration was playing the role of
³benevolent hegemon², providing global public goods that the rest of the
international community could not.

The Bush administration failed to anticipate the almost uniformly hostile
reaction to benevolent hegemony, not only among those countries
traditionally hostile to US purposes, but also among America¹s closest
European allies. Legitimacy came neither ex ante nor ex post. At an elite
level, leaders may seek to restore good relations with Washington out of
self-interest, but at a mass level there has been a seismic shift in the way
much of the world perceives the US, whose image is no longer the Statue of
Liberty but the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

There are several reasons for this. A hegemon has to be perceived not just
as benevolent but competent. With the administration¹s failure to find Iraqi
WMD and its bungling of the Iraq reconstruction process, Washington¹s
credibility plummeted. The Bush doctrine¹s preventive war doctrine was,
moreover, based on implicit assertion of US exceptionalism. Given that the
US would almost certainly criticise a similar anti-terrorist policy
proclaimed by Russia, China or India, its assertion of this right rested on
the premise that America is somehow more disinterested than other nations.
Americans may believe in their own good intentions but international
legitimacy emerges only if others do as well. Long before the Iraq war,
Americans failed to perceive deep currents of anti- Americanism building up.

The final aspect of the Bush doctrine, democracy promotion via coercive
regime change, was again something whose defects were practical rather than
normative. The Iraq war seems to have been planned on the assumption that
democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once
tyrants were removed, rather than a collection of complex institutions that
needed to be painstakingly built over years. The administration grossly
underestimated the costs and capabilities required to stabilise Iraq.

The best way to assess the durability of the Bush doctrine is to ask how
likely it is to be applied again in the future ­ that is, how ready is the
US to again intervene unilaterally to topple a rogue state proliferator and
engage in another nation-building exercise? The answer comes from the Bush
administration itself, which has already backed away from military
confrontations with both North Korea and Iran in favour of multilateral
approaches, despite much clearer evidence of nuclear programmes in those
countries. This suggests the doctrine has not survived into Mr Bush¹s second
term, much less become a permanent component of US strategy against global
terrorism.

The writer is professor of international political economy at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and editorial chairman of
The American Interest, a new magazine
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