In Defense of the Bush Doctrine

In Defense of the Bush Doctrine

In Defense

of the

Bush Doctrine

ROBERT G. KAUFMAN

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant

from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

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07  08  09  10  11    5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaufman, Robert Gordon.

In defense of the Bush doctrine / Robert G. Kaufman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2434-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8131-2434-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. United States—Foreign relations—2001–   2. United States—Foreign relations—Philosophy.   3. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946–   —Political and social views.   4. Terrorism—Government policy—United States.   5. War on terrorism, 2001–   6. Iraq War, 2003–   7. Unilateral acts (International law)

8. Intervention (International law) I. Title.

E902.K385 2007

327.73009′0511—dc22                                            2006038458

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

To the memory of Corporal Mark Asher Evnin, USMC

May 18, 1981–April 3, 2003

Killed in action, Al Kut, Iraq

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Imprudence of Isolationism

2. The Perils of Neorealism

3. The Unrealistic Realism of Classical Realists

4. The Perils of Liberal Multilateralism

5. Moral Democratic Realism

6. Moral Democratic Realism and the Endgame of the Cold War

7. The Bush Doctrine and Iraq: A Sound Application of a Sound Doctrine

8. Conclusion: Beyond the War on Terror

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to those who made this project possible. Matthew Spalding at the Heritage Foundation planted the seed for systematically developing my ideas about the Bush Doctrine. Under the auspices of Heritage, he hosted my delivering a public lecture on the first principles of American foreign policy in light of the events September 11, 2001. He commented insightfully and sympathetically on several versions of the manuscript. I also benefited greatly from the encouragement of Dean James Wilburn at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, who provided a stimulating intellectual atmosphere for me to undertake this book. Several friends and colleagues generously took the time to read this manuscript. My warm thanks to Professor James Q. Wilson for his insightful comments and assurances that the manuscript should be published. My warm thanks as well to Michael Warder, Vice Chancellor at Pepperdine, and my dear friend Kelsey Bush Nadeau for their wise and sympathetic editorial suggestions. Vincent Beerman, my research assistant, and Marie Ann Thaler, the administrative assistant for the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, also deserve great credit for their labors on this manuscript and their patience with me.

My special thanks go to the director of the University Press of Kentucky, Steve Wrinn, his assistant, Anne Dean Watkins, and their fine staff, particularly Ann Twombly, my deft and patient copy editor.

As usual, my greatest thanks go to my family: to my parents, who in my childhood cultivated my interest in history, politics, and lively debate, even when they typically disagreed with my ultimate conclusions; to my sister, who is enormously generous and brave; to my daughters, Caroline and Natalie, who indulged their father in so many ways; and above all, to my lovely wife, Anne, who is the anchor of my life.

Introduction

September 11, 2001, marks a pivotal day for American grand strategy. Homicide bombers initiated World War IV by demolishing the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and destroying part of the Pentagon. This attack shattered the optimistic illusions so prevalent during the tranquil 1990s that American foreign policy had reached the end of history: democracy was triumphant and catastrophic wars were a relic of the past. The Bush administration’s bold and ambitious grand strategy for waging the war on terror (the Bush Doctrine) has ignited a passionate debate about the purposes of American power and America’s role in the world.

The Bush Doctrine rests on two main pillars. First, the events of September 11 rudely demonstrate the inadequacy of deterrence, containment, or ex post facto responses when dealing with terrorists and rogue regimes bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD); hence, the United States cannot rule out the option of using force preemptively rather than reactively. Second, the root cause of 9/11 and similarly inspired aggression is the culture of tyranny in the Middle East, which spawns fanatical, aggressive, secular, and religious despotisms; hence, the United States must promote democratic regime change in that region. Or, in the words of President Bush, The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroad of radicalism and WMD technology.¹ His remedy is the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East.² The president envisages the achievement of these goals as the work of generations: The United States is in the early years of a long struggle similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War. The twentieth century witnessed the triumph of freedom over threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion. Its content may be different from the ideologies of the last century, but the means are similar: intolerance, murder, terror, enslavement, and repression.³ The most scathing criticism of the Bush Doctrine in the United States has come from a formidable coalition of isolationists, realists, and liberal multilateralists.⁴ Such discord is the norm in times of peril. In the annals of American history, war often has served as the catalyst for fundamental transformations of American grand strategy.⁵ The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, lasting from 1792 to 1815, triggered a ferocious debate in America over foreign policy, which eventually culminated in President Washington’s dictum of no entangling alliances or commitments outside the Western Hemisphere that entailed the cost or risk of war. This strategy of isolationism, or armed neutrality, reigned supreme in American diplomacy for nearly 150 years; the discredited American intervention in World War I was the exception that proved the rule. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Nazi Germany’s declaration of war against the United States days later to convince a generation of American statesmen once and for all that isolationism no longer sufficed to protect American national security in the changing circumstances of the twentieth century.

After World War II the Truman administration devised a new grand strategy of vigilant containment in response to the emergence of the Soviet threat and the advent of nuclear weapons. This strategy aimed to wear down and ultimately defeat Soviet totalitarianism through robust forward deterrence and through the establishment of a worldwide American alliance system, with the democracies of Western Europe and Japan as the linchpins.

During the 1970s the agonizing debate over the Vietnam War generated intense pressure to recast American grand strategy. The unanticipated outcome of this debate was the election of Ronald Reagan, who contributed mightily to winning the Cold War during the 1980s by reviving and intensifying President Truman’s original conception of robust containment.

This book offers a vigorous defense of the Bush Doctrine and the principles underlying it, which I call moral democratic realism. It strives to connect the Bush Doctrine and the contemporary debate over American foreign policy to the richer, deeper tradition of American diplomatic history, drawing from the positive lessons as well as the cautionary tales of the past. Two major premises shape this case for moral democratic realism and the Bush Doctrine’s conformity to it.

The first is that the fundamental purposes of American foreign policy have remained largely the same since the founding of the United States: to assure the integrity and vitality of a free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual. Or in the timeless words of National Security Council 68 (NSC 68), written in 1950, which laid out the rationale for U.S. strategy for much of the Cold War: Our determination to maintain the essential freedoms as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.⁶ The second is that the cardinal virtue of prudence, as St. Thomas Aquinas defined it—right reason about things to be done—ought to serve as the standard for evaluating the best practicable American grand strategy.⁷ Aquinas’s conception of prudence does not correspond to mere caution or Machiavellian cunning. On the contrary, it not only presupposes moral virtue, the choice of right ends, but also the wisdom to choose the right means to achieve them. The eminent Thomist Joseph Pieper aptly expresses Aquinas’s conception of prudence that informs this book:

The pre-eminence of prudence means that so-called good intentions and meaning well by no means suffice. Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to real situations, that is, to the concrete realities that inform the environment of concrete human action; and that we objectively take concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity. . . . In the decisions of prudence, which by the very nature of prudence are concerned with things concrete, contingent, and future, there cannot be that certainty which is possible in a theoretical conclusion. . . . Man, then, when he comes to a decision cannot ever be sufficiently prescient nor can he wait until logic affords him absolute certainly. If he waited for that, he would never come to a decision; he would remain in a state inconclusiveness, unless he chose to make a shift with deceptive certitude. The prudent man does not expect certainty where it cannot exist, nor on the other hand does he deceive himself with false certainties.⁸

The requisites for prudence in statecraft include, among other things, the capacity to apply general principles to particular circumstances; a realistic assessment of man’s nature and the dynamics of the international environment; discernment about the probable consequences of alternative courses of action; and the ability to reconcile the desirable with the possible.⁹

Employing this standard of prudence, chapters 1 through 4 analyze the inadequacies of major alternative schools of foreign policy that are at odds with the Bush Doctrine: isolationism, neorealism, classical realism, and liberal multilateralism. Chapter 5 lays out the precepts of moral democratic realism and the compelling rationale for it as the best practicable guide for American foreign policy. Moral democratic realism is congenial with but not identical to Charles Krauthammer’s democratic realism.¹⁰ Like the neoconservative outlook of William Kristol and Robert Kagan, it incorporates the higher realism that understands why spreading stable, liberal democracy is in the American national interest.¹¹ Yet moral democratic realism grounds American foreign policy more explicitly in Judeo-Christian ethics than Krauthammer does. It also imposes tighter geopolitical limits on the use of American power to promote democracy than Kristol and Kagan’s more unconstrained vision does. For, as George Weigel observes, Democracy is not simply a matter of procedures; democracy is a matter of ideas, ideals, and moral commitments. . . . Neither skepticism nor relativism by their own logic can give account for why people should aspire to be free, tolerant, decent, and civil.¹²

Chapter 6 assesses the record of the three major contending approaches to the final two decades of the Cold War: President Nixon’s realism; President Carter’s liberal multilateralism; and President Reagan’s moral democratic realism. This is a critically important case not only because of the intrinsic importance of the Cold War, but because these approaches continue to dominate the current debate over the Bush Doctrine. Chapter 7 argues that the war in Iraq was a correct application of the Bush Doctrine. Chapter 8 weighs the implications of the Bush Doctrine and moral democratic realism for the challenges American foreign policy will face beyond the war on terror, the most daunting of which is the rising power of China.

1

The Imprudence

of Isolationism

Commentators as astute as Charles Krauthammer and Norman Podhoretz have largely dismissed rather than systematically refuted the isolationist tradition in their powerful defenses of President Bush’s approach to the war on terror.¹ This is a mistake. As Eugene Rostow has observed more perceptively, public understanding of the American tradition in foreign affairs before World War I—particularly Washington’s Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine—still has a significant influence on the way in which the nation conceives of its proper role in the world.² One must seriously confront contemporary isolationist critics of President Bush, such as Patrick Buchanan, who warn of dire peril for the nation unless we repudiate the policy of democratic globalism. Revisiting the formative period of American foreign policy also refines our facility for making reasonable distinctions between the permanent and the contingent aspects of the Founders’ thinking about foreign affairs.³

In a series of books, articles, and public commentary, Buchanan has set forth a systematic rehabilitation and defense of an America-first foreign policy that demands the withdrawal of American power and protection from most of the world outside the Western Hemisphere.⁴ His main line of argument runs as follows: by piling up open-ended, extravagant, and provocative commitments unrelated to the true interests of the nation, American leaders have reenacted every folly that brought previous great powers to ruin. Borrowing heavily from the arguments of Paul Kennedy’s 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Buchanan assails as reckless and unsustainable a foreign policy that commits America to go to war for scores of nations where we have never fought. He warns that the day of reckoning is approaching when American global hegemony is going to be challenged, and our leaders will discover they lack the resources to make good on all the war guarantees they have handed out so frivolously; and the American people, awakened to what it is their statesmen have committed them to do, will declare war themselves, unwilling to pay the price of empire.⁵

Buchanan calls the Bush Doctrine a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics. Wisdom, according to Buchanan, yielded again to hubris when the Bush administration committed the United States to extending liberty and freedom in the Middle East. He identifies as the root cause of Islamic hostility toward the United States the massive American presence in the Middle East and what he considers our one-sided support for Israel. We must, Buchanan declares, jettison American commitments that risk our involvement in major conflicts in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Instead, he advocates a return to isolationism—or in his preferred designation, the America First Tradition—which, he claims, governed American foreign policy from 1776 until 1917.

There are, however, several enormous problems in Buchanan’s analysis fatal to his project of reviving isolationism as an alternative to President Bush’s moral democratic realism.

Washington’s Strategy of Non-entanglement Rightly Understood

Americans wisely have repudiated Buchanan’s hostility to the notion of exporting the institutions of freedom. From our founding, our great statesmen have always conceived of the United States as an empire of liberty, a beacon for spreading democracy elsewhere; indeed, the Declaration of Independence defines rights not in particular but in universal terms. What Americans have always debated vigorously is not the desirability but the possibility of expanding the zone of democratic peace at tolerable cost and risk.⁶ During our formative period in the early nineteenth century, the nation confined its role to promoting freedom by example. The United States was still a fledgling republic, vulnerable to the major powers of a European state system; domestic conditions for establishing liberal democracy abroad remained unpropitious. John Quincy Adams captured the essence of a policy that was surely prudent for the conditions of his time:

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. . . . She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. . . . Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.⁷

Thus, when the wars of the French Revolution broke out in 1792, President Washington stoutly and prudentially defied the intense pressure of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Speaker of the House James Madison to construe broadly our obligations to France under the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 and adopt a pro-French orientation that would risk war with Great Britain and Spain. Instead, Washington proclaimed in his seminal Neutrality Proclamation of 1793 American impartiality in the struggle between France and Great Britain. Jefferson, Madison, and the powerful pro-French forces in American politics that they represented construed the French Revolution wrongly as a struggle for well-ordered liberty analogous to the American Revolution rather than the descent into tyranny it was to become.

Washington not only harbored more serious doubts about the trajectory of the French Revolution, but also recognized that the United States was in no position to embark on ideological crusades in any event. Even after the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, the American strategic position remained precarious. Spain controlled New Orleans and access to the Mississippi, on which three-eighths of American trade depended. Great Britain continued to occupy military posts in the West, despite its own agreement to evacuate; the British continued to stir up the hostility of Indian tribes toward American settlers.

The international wars stemming from the French Revolution, which consumed the major European powers for more than two decades, posed simultaneously an immense opportunity and potentially grave danger for the nation. By staying neutral, the United States could expand relatively unmolested and settle its frontier problems with Britain in the north and Spain in the south to America’s advantage and without war. If the United States became embroiled in the French Revolution, the young nation would become perilously vulnerable to France’s British and Spanish enemies sitting athwart its vital flanks.⁸

These strategic circumstances dictated the policy of neutrality Washington pursued during his two administrations and inspired his Farewell Address of September 19, 1796, in which he justified this strategy. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course, counseled Washington.

If we remain one people . . . the period is not very far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance . . . when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not likely hazard the giving us of provocation; when we may choose between peace and war as our interests, guided by our Justice, shall counsel. . . . Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? —Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humor or Caprice? ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world. . . . Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments, on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary circumstances.

The principles that Washington set forth in the farewell address—non-entanglement in affairs outside the Western Hemisphere—were not only prudent but necessary in an era of multipolarity: the United States was weak in the world of the strong. In these circumstances the United States had no interest at stake worth the potentially mortal risk of being prematurely immersed in the vicissitudes, combinations, and collisions of a European states system.⁹ The source of Buchanan’s error lies not in his defense of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century isolationism, but in his extension of this policy into a permanent rather than contingent strategy, which the Founders never intended.

Nor does Buchanan grasp how much the efficacy of isolationism presupposed another contingent rather than permanent condition: a self-regulating European balance of power, in which Great Britain operates reliably as the ultimate balancer.¹⁰ Long before Sir Halford Mackinder developed his conception of geopolitics at the beginning of the twentieth century, generations of British statesmen instinctively practiced fundamentals of his geopolitical maxims: if a single hostile power or combination of such powers came to dominate Europe, it would possess the abundance of resources necessary to overcome Great Britain on sea as well as on land. Great Britain therefore had a vital interest in preventing any such powers from achieving this dominance. Winston Churchill wrote:

For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent. . . . Faced by Philip II of Spain, against Louis XIV, . . . against Napoleon, against William II of Germany, it would have been easy and must have been very tempting to join with the stronger and share the fruits of his conquest. However, we always took the harder course, joined with the less strong Powers, and made a combination among them, and thus defeated and frustrated the Continental military tyrant wherever he was, whatever nation he led. Thus we preserve the liberty of Europe. . . . Here is that wonderful unconscious tradition of British foreign policy. . . . I know of nothing which has occurred to alter or weaken the justice, wisdom, valour and prudence upon which our ancestors acted. I know of nothing in military, political, economic, or scientific fact which makes me feel that we are less capable. I know of nothing which makes me feel that we might not, or cannot, march along the same road. . . . Observe that the policy of England takes no account of which nation it is that seeks overlordship of Europe. . . . It is concerned solely with whoever is the strongest or politically dominant tyrant.¹¹

During our formative period, 1776–1824, all great American statesmen from Benjamin Franklin to John Quincy Adams paid keen attention to the European balance of power, deftly exploiting the rivalries it spawned: first to win independence for America; then to consolidate the American republic; then vastly to expand the realm of it. The 1778 alliance with France, so decisive for the outcome of the Revolutionary War, came about through our exploitation of the long and bitter rivalry between Great Britain and France. French statesmen regarded the success of the American Revolution as a way of avenging Britain’s smashing victory in the French and Indian War.

During the initial phase of the wars of the French Revolution, the Washington administration exploited the distractions of and rivalries between the major powers of Europe to secure two major treaties. Jay’s Treaty of 1794 brought the British finally to execute fully the Treaty of Paris of 1783, diminished the American Indian threat in the Northwest, and averted a war with the British over neutral rights for which the United States was woefully unprepared. Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 with Spain secured American access to the entire Mississippi, which was so important for retaining the loyalty of the Western states and expanding across the continent.¹²

Similarly, the great diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis described the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 as another magnificent example of how Europe’s distresses worked to America’s advantage. It was the impending resumption of war between France and Great Britain that induced Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for a bargain price: the size of the nation virtually doubled, and the United States was ensured that it would become a vast continental republic rather than a vulnerable coastal state.¹³

Europe’s rivalries again worked to America’s advantage to produce another great milestone in American diplomacy: the Monroe Doctrine of December 1823 prohibited European powers from restoring to Spain any of its former colonies that had established their independence. Monroe could proclaim this bold doctrine with confidence—in defiance of the Holy Roman Alliance of France, Russia, Prussia, and the Hapsburg Empire—because the Royal Navy silently but effectively underwrote it. Great Britain also opposed the restoration of Spanish colonial rule to newly independent Latin American republics for strategic as well as commercial reasons. As the dominant maritime and commercial power of the day, Britain preferred an independent Latin America open to trade rather than a Spanish empire that restricted it. Hence, Great Britain warned France and other members of the Holy Roman Alliance against interference with the independence of the former Spanish colonies.¹⁴

With the exception of Thomas Jefferson, who obtusely dismissed the grave danger Napoleon would pose to the United States if France conquered all of continental Europe and Great Britain, virtually all the Founders dreaded the prospect of a single power achieving such dominance, with good reason: the preservation of the European balance of power was vital to the United States as well as to Great Britain. Even Jefferson acknowledged that it cannot be in our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy. He wished for and expected a salutary balance [that] may be ever maintained among nations.¹⁵

The American interest in preventing any single hostile hegemon from dominating any of the world’s major power centers thus has remained constant since the founding. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United States had neither the need nor the capacity to maintain a balance of power in Europe; a felicitous combination of technology, prevailing political conditions on the European continent, and foresight of British statesmanship produced an equilibrium among the major powers of Europe that was favorable to American interests. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the prodigious expansion of the American republic coincided with a period of remarkable stability in Europe, and Americans were inclined to take this European equilibrium for granted.¹⁶

Isolationism’s Peril and the Two World Wars

By the beginning of the twentieth century, a convergence of political and technological developments had rendered the strategy of isolationism perilously obsolete. The rise of a united, enormously powerful Germany at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution after 1871, and the belated but incipient emergence of Russia into modernity beginning in the late nineteenth century, had radically undermined the equilibrium of the European balance of power, along with Britain’s capacity to maintain it.

No one grasped the logic or implications of this transformation better than Halford Mackinder. His prescient theories, first set forth in Geographical Pivot of History, published in 1904, have rightly shaped American grand strategy since World War II. Mackinder warned that any single power dominating the resources of Eurasia, the World Island, as he called it, would have the potential to dominate the world, including the United States. He depicted the history of Eurasia as a perennial struggle between more closed, authoritarian continental empires of the east-central European heartland, preeminent in land power, versus more free and eventually more democratic empires of Western Europe, preeminent in sea power. According to Mackinder, the maritime states enjoyed a