Blueprint for Bush Doctrine

Tom Barry of Foreign Policy In Focus writes,

The White House's National Security Strategy of the United States, released September 2002, briefly outlines the new Bush foreign policy doctrine of global military domination and interventionism. But the full scope and ambition of the Bush foreign and military policy is more comprehensively laid out in a book called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy produced by the Project for the New American Century in 2000. In this edited volume by PNAC founders Robert Kagan and William Kristol, one can find what amounts to a blueprint for the current objectives of U.S. global engagement. Nonstate terrorism is given short shrift in the book, which includes chapters written by such current top foreign policy team players as Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and Peter Rodman.

It's a call for a doctrine of frontier justice in which the top gun--the U.S.--saddles up and hustles together a posse to pursue bandits and rogues. According to the conservative internationalists, like Paul Wolfowitz, we "must descend from the realm of general principles to the making of specific decisions." While laws, judges, and trials are what we "want for our domestic political process … foreign policy decisions cannot be subject to that kind of rule of law."

PNAC's Present Dangers apparently functions as a playbook for the Bush administration. In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" credo that has become the operating principle of this administration. "Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace," wrote Abrams, who is the administration's National Security Council Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. Like the other PNAC principals, Abrams calls for a preemptive "toppling of Saddam Hussein." Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be the base of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region, according to Abrams.

...The Bush administration contends...that U.S. war-making is a strike for peace. Writing during the last presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol called for a new foreign policy based on the principles of superior military power and conservative internationalism. "Conservative internationalists," they said, "…are the true heirs to a tradition in American foreign policy that runs from Theodore Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan." Fortunately, most of the international community and growing numbers of Americans reject the revival of 19th century gunboat diplomacy as an appropriate manifestation of 21st century internationalism.