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In the last quarter of 2003, the situation in Iraq worsened as combat deaths and sectarian violence increased significantly, prompting several proponents of the war to reconsider their position in the face of impending defeat. Although President Bush has not specified an exit strategy, he did agree to the creation of the Baker Commission, which is in favor of the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East and negotiating with Syria and Iran. He also appointed Robert Gates, a known realist, to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. No matter what happens in Iraq, the general principles underlying the Bush Doctrine remain valid and should serve as a guide for the US in crafting a foreign policy that is consistent with American ideals and is geared toward ensuring the security of the free world.

Many of the tenets of the Bush Doctrine are derived from the Reagan administration's foreign policy positions. Similar to Reagan's stand on nuclear arms and strategic defense during the Cold War, President George W. Bush believes that preemption is a prudential strategy in responding to terrorist threats, depending on the dynamics and changing conditions of international politics. Those who criticize Bush for what they say is an arrogant and imprudent commitment to spreading democracy in the Middle East should note that this aspiration is consistent with the traditions of diplomacy that proved successful during World War II and the Cold War. The decision to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq in 2003 was necessary, given Saddam's posturing and propensity to take enormous risks that rendered containment or imposing sanctions inadequate. Bush wisely recognized that negotiating with rogue regimes is futile and that democratic regime change is imperative in addressing the root cause of the conflict in the Middle East.

Chapter 2, on political contexts, includes detailed discussion of The 9/11 Commission Report, and the Bush administration's neoconservative National Security Strategy (2002) and its relationship with international law. It includes supporting discussion of a broad range of contemporary source material, including Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil, Sidney Blumenthal's How Bush Rules, Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command, reports on detention and torture by Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations), and documents lobbying for neoconservative policy options. The chapter also refers to a range of scholarship on the Bush Doctrine, and discusses significant contemporary debates about related issues including the “unitary executive” and “adversarial review”.

This concluding chapter assesses the debate over humanitarian intervention in the light of the events of September 11, 2001. On the one hand, it can be argued that 9/11 has reversed the momentum behind the norm of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’. In the course of waging the war on terrorism, the powers of sovereign states have been increased and the willingness of Western states to criticize the treatment of civilians within other sovereign jurisdictions appears to have weakened. On the other, there are three reasons why humanitarian intervention – and the issues associated with it – will continue to preoccupy scholars and statesmen in a post-September 11th world. First, the terrorist attacks of 2001 have reinforced the view that instability within or collapse of a state anywhere in the world can have implications that reach far wider than that particular region. Second, the debate about what constraints should be placed on the use of force – particularly those related to proper authority – are as relevant for the ‘war on terror’ as they are for humanitarian intervention. Finally, as the missions in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 have shown, humanitarian rationale are all-important in justifying the use of force in international society, even when other motives are at work.

The reasoning behind the Bush administration's strategy in fighting terrorism, also known as the Bush Doctrine, rests primarily on the belief that preemptive rather than reactive force is necessary in the US's fight against terror—as was highlighted by the events of September 11, 2001—and that a democratic regime change is needed in the Middle East, where a culture of tyranny and radicalism exists. This book contends that the Bush Doctrine is based on the principles of moral democratic realism, which is supported by two major premises: that preserving the vitality and integrity of a free society remains the fundamental goal of American foreign policy; and that the country's strategy should be guided by the virtue of prudence by not merely choosing the right ends but also the right means to achieve them.

Neorealists such as Stephen M. Walt argue that the Bush administration's war on terror did not promote democratic reforms in the Middle East but instead heightened anti-American sentiment in the region. They argue that the US should have adopted a policy that allowed the natural dynamics and structure of the international system to provide global security, thereby limiting the country's involvement in foreign affairs. What they failed to consider, however, is that ideologies, regime types, and the propensities of individual leaders to significantly affect how states behave as can be seen in the contrasting results of the appeasement policy used on Nazi Germany during the 1930s and the prudent and more far-sighted strategy used during the Cold War. Even as the situation in the Middle East remains unstable, the Bush Doctrine can hardly be considered a failure as its critics claim. American intervention not only led to free elections in Iraq but brought down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and thwarted Al-Qaeda's attempts to attack the US once again.

Moving to an application of the worldviews of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, this chapter examines the decisions to go to war with Iraq. Beginning with George H.W. Bush, the chapter examines the administration’s policy toward Iraq prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It then analyzes how George H.W. Bush and his administration responded to the invasion. Turning to George W. Bush, the chapter explores the pre-September 11th administration policy toward Iraq and the impact of the September 11th attacks on the United States on that policy. Returning to George H.W. Bush, the chapter explains how the president and his advisors pursued a policy of multilateralism, building a coalition to defend Saudi Arabia and, if necessary, evict Iraq from Kuwait. Finally, the chapter concludes by focusing on George W. Bush’s argument for regime change in Iraq, focusing on how the president and his advisors made that case. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how the “enlightened” realist and “cowboy” liberal worldviews played a role in each administration’s decisions and policies.

This chapter examines neo-Wilsonianism in the White House, considering the Bush Doctrine—often referred to as the National Security Strategy of the United States, September 2002, or NSS-2002. In the annals of American foreign policy there had never been anything even remotely like NSS-2002, its façade of Wilsonianism covering a far more aggressive imperialist claim for American exceptionalism than Woodrow Wilson had ever espoused, which in due course threatened to destroy altogether the credentials of good stewardship for world affairs that American liberal internationalism had enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1980s. One month after NSS-2002 appeared, the Iraq Resolution passed Congress with strong majorities in both chambers. Neo-Wilsonianism, born in theory during the 1990s, entered into practice five months after this historic vote with the invasion of Iraq that started on March 20, 2003. The chapter then looks at neo-Wilsonianism during the Obama presidency.

This chapter takes a systematic look at the Bush Doctrine in general and its application to the North Korean case in particular. It explores how 9/11 and the specter of nuclear terrorism gave new meaning to the problems of rogue states and nuclear proliferation, altering previous understandings and policy trajectories laid out by the Clinton administration. This chapter argues that the George W. Bush administration, with its almost exclusive focus on the global, nuclear dimension of the North Korean and Iranian challenges, globalized what had traditionally been regional security problems. In East Asia, where North Korea became a matter of domestic political contestation as nations sought greater regional roles and foreign policy autonomy, the U.S. policy shift was seen as problematic and threatening to regional stability. This chapter maps out broad patterns in the global and regional understandings of, and policy behavior toward, the North Korean challenge.

This chapter, which examines the impact of the Iraq War on U.S. efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, suggests that the Bush Doctrine failed and that the invasion has only convinced other countries that they must have nuclear weapons in order to deter U.S. aggression against them. It highlights the need to develop a new counterproliferation strategy based on an understanding of the failures of the Iraq War.

This chapter identifies several flaws in the arguments of Patrick Buchanan and others in favor of isolationism over the moral democratic realism espoused by the Bush Doctrine as the country's strategy in the fight against terror. Over the years, American foreign policy necessarily drifted away from its isolationist stance in international conflicts, particularly during its formative years in the early nineteenth century, toward one that had the US more actively involved in keeping the balance of power during World Wars I and II and during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Today's geopolitical environment dictates that the US embrace its role as the world's only remaining superpower, given the continuing unrest in the Middle East and notwithstanding China's emergence as an economic powerhouse.

This chapter analyzes Bush's instant responses to 9/11, as he made the fundamental decision that the U.S. would engage in a war on terror. The chapter then traces the development of the key principles of the Bush doctrine, and examines to what degree these were the president's original ideas and to what degree Bush adopted the pre-existing views of neo-conservatives in his administration. It then considers other strategic responses – realist, liberal internationalist, isolationist – that Bush could have chosen and shows how they were inconsistent with his temperament. Finally, the chapter considers Secretary Rumsfeld's response to 9/11, thereby tracing the beginnings of the divergence in ideas between the president and the secretary of defense.

This chapter explores the link between security assurances and North Korean nuclear decision-making by concentrating on four key areas. The first analysis presented here is an evaluation of key geopolitical shocks that had a major effect on the North Korean regime. The second is an analysis of the main sources of security assurances for North Korea over its history. Thirdly, hypotheses on security assurances based on how North Korea reacted to geopolitical shocks are explored. The chapter finally investigates the conditions under which security assurances may be most efficient in dealing with North Korea in the future. The four key waves that have hit North Korea include the Sino-Soviet split and rivalry, Nordpolitik of South Korea, the collapse of the Agreed Framework, and the advent of the Bush Doctrine. North Korea's nuclear policy responded to these waves to assure short-term survival. Creativity in adapting a security assurance to North Korea is a major determinant of the reclusive country's receptivity and reciprocity.

The chapter challenges the claim that 9/11 represented a break or moment of rupture in American history, and discusses the uses to which this claim was put by neoconservatives and the Bush White House in their attempts to justify a broad-based reinvention of US foreign policy and national security strategy. Instead, the chapter depicts the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 worlds as broadly continuous, presenting 9/11 as one moment in a much wider, transnational Islamist insurgency which gathered momentum during the 1990s. The chapter introduces the idea—explored throughout the book—that the Bush Doctrine ushered in a period of ‘crisis’ in republican governance and international law.