The ever-shifting ‘Bush Doctrine’

May 30, 2005

Atrios raised a point yesterday that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

This has been bugging me for some time but I can’t possibly be the only one who has noticed. Internet connection is too crappy to look into this deeply right now, but has anyone else noticed that our media allowed the “Bush Doctrine” to magically evolve from “pre-emptive war against anyone who might want to hurt us” to “spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world” without blinking?

That’s a good point, but I’d add that the “Bush Doctrine” has transitioned between at least three different notions.

The first doctrine was supposed to be the “with us or against us” policy.

The world President Bush has described since Sept. 11 is divided between good and evil, a black-and-white map on which each country must choose its color. “Either you are with us,” Bush said in his Sept. 20 speech to Congress, “or you are with the terrorists.”

That is the essence of what the president now calls the Bush Doctrine. Asked to define it further, a senior White House official said: “We must eliminate the scourge of international terrorism. In order to do that, we need not only to eliminate the terrorists and their networks, but also those who harbor them.”

When that proved ineffectual as a standard for shaping policy — we show tolerance for harboring nations all the time — the doctrine shifted into a preemption principle that empowered Bush to wage war against countries, whether they’re a threat or not, based solely on the idea that they might someday be a threat.

When that doctrine was left in shreds, Bush used his second inaugural to roll out a third doctrine to replace the first two: we’re not only defending democracies, we’re committed to creating them around the globe.

Except this wasn’t really a new “doctrine” per se, because almost as soon as the speech was over, the White House said the notion was more an idealistic goal than a policy — one Bush aide famously said, “Do you want us to be rhetorical or to be effective?” — and certainly isn’t the kind of approach we’re going to pursue anytime soon.

In other words, five years and three iterations later, there really isn’t a Bush Doctrine to speak of, unless you include “we’re making this up as we go along” a principle of government.

The Bush doctrine is: Whatever sounds good today.
It goes beyond ‘making it up as we go along.’ It demands we go along with rewriting history to best serve the moment, and ignore the likely outcome of whatever sounds good at the moment. If they were ‘making it up as they went along,’ they would pay occasional attention to where they are going.

  • There you go again with your “reality based” thinking and criticism. Don’t you know that “The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform” through His chosen profit-prophet George (aka “The Burning”) Bush? “Yea, though I fall off my sofa or mountain bike, I shall find comfort in Cheney’s rod and the staff of Rove, etc. Amen and Hallelujah! Take comfort in the Cross of Gold.”

  • Me three. There is no mystery here. The doctrine is that there is no doctrine.

    I think it was Richard Clarke who noted that, in this adminitration, there *is* no policy-making apparatus. It’s all politics. Rove is a *political* strategist, not a policy wonk. The wonks– even the right-wing wonks– have been driven from this administration completely.

    Bush has the political equivalent of what is know in business as “quarter-itis”. Remember, Bush is our first (and hopefully our last!) MBA president. Send these cocksuckers packing and don’t ever elect another one of them, please. The way he is running this country is exactly the same way every CEO/COO/CFO/CMO I’ve ever worked for has had to run his company: with blinders on everything except the next quarter’s earnings. Nobody cares about anything else except hitting the Street’s fucking number in 90 days. Nothing else is important. The privatisation of government is complete; they’re running it like a corporation. For Rove and Bush, their planning horizon extends only as far as the next congressional election cycle.

    Rove and Bush don’t know how to make policy. They *do* know how to win elections, however. At some point, if we are clever, we’ll figure out how to hit them in that blind spot… hard.

  • The various iterations of the so-called Bush Doctrine very much reflect fault-lines within American conservatism at the present time. The Republican Party is sort of the bottleneck for the conservative movement, which means that it is the White House, more or less, that channels conservative political theory into practise. (I think back to David Brooks’s column in the Times a while back, where he argued that the strength of the conservative movement is precisely its diversity. Yes, to a point. But it would be nothing without an effective political machine.)

    The problem is that it is difficult to maintain consistency from theory to practise, from ideological rigor to political expediency. To me, this is why the “Doctrine” has been so malleable. You have the traditional, old-school realists (Kissingerian types like Scowcroft and the rest of Bush I’s team), the Christian moralists (Brownback et al.), and the neoconservatives. The first emphasizes national self-interest (strictly defined), the second moral interventionism (often to defend Christians), the third an idealistic remodelling of the world order. It seems as if the latter two have often squeezed out the first, though relations with Pakistan and Uzbekistan (to name but two) suggest that realism is very much alive beneath the rhetorical surface. I would say that all three seek realization through official policy channels, but, of course, those policy channels give way to political reality. In the end, it is Rove, more than the ideologues at PNAC, who determines the course of American foreign policy. So if the so-called Bush Doctrine seems to have shifted through various iterations, well, that’s politics.

    Which is not to excuse it, by the way. I’ve opposed all three variations.

  • I would add another point: It’s interesting how the Bush Docrtrine has shifted in terms of its philosophical underpinnings. The first version, with us or against us, is Carl Schmitt (politics defined in terms of friends and enemies), a view of justice also proposed by Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic. The second, military preemption, is Machiavelli, a hard-nosed sense of perpetual war (since there will never be a world without enemies of some kind, whether internal or external). And the third, the spread of democracy, is Hegel and Kojeve (end-of-history idealism).

    I’m not saying that the formulators of the various iterations of the Bush Doctrine were aware of these underpinnings, but they’re there nonetheless. See my own post on this here.

    • Comments are closed.