Marking a dramatic break with doctrines that have governed more than half a century of U.S. foreign and military policy, President George W. Bush declared in June 2002 that new threats require the U.S. to adopt a new policy of 'preemptive action.' In ...
Marking a dramatic break with doctrines that have governed more than half a century of U.S. foreign and military policy, President George W. Bush declared in June 2002 that new threats require the U.S. to adopt a new policy of 'preemptive action.' In line with this new Bush doctrine, the White House drew up a new national security strategy that would enable the U.S. to launch preemptive military strikes against groups or countries that pose a threat to America and its allies. Iraq was taken as a test case.
More than fifty years ago, at the beginning of the Cold War, the U.S. National Security Council explicitly rejected the notion of 'preventive' or 'preemptive 'war, calling it 'repugnant' to American values and principles. That policy stood the U.S. in good stead for decades, and played a crucial role in preventing the Cold War from turning into a hot war. But, U.S. strategists have argued that terrorist groups and rogue states are not like the former Soviet Union, governed by predictable and logical principles of self-preservation. Precisely because the usual calculus of self-interest is meaningless to them, the U.S. cannot afford to wait for the threats they pose to U.S. security to fully materialize before it acts. The best defense here is a good offense. Thus, the war against terrorism after September 11^th has pushed the Bush administration to take an 'offensive realism.'
The so-called 'neoconservatives' in and out of the Bush administration are conducting offensive realist strategies, driven by the ideological foundations of a sense of moral superiority legitimizing that American values should be retained and propagated throughout the world; of a Hobbesian worldview that stresses the inevitability of war for a civilized world; and of active interventionism for the spread of democracy and market economy. It has had a profound impact on US foreign policy changes since the 911 terrorist attacks. The ultimate goal of neoconservative security strategies is 'Pax Americana,' and neocons endorse the strategies for hegemonic stability, the counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the preservation of nuclear strategic superiority, and the expansion of the 'democratic peace zone.'
There are voices at home criticizing the neocons' growing power as one that "is quickly heading for militarism and will fuel anti-U.S. sentiments around the world, thereby aggravating the U.S. economy." At the same time, the September 11^th terrorist attacks have served to build a public consensus that America must deal a tough blow to terrorist attacks. What is more, while critics merely point out possible abuses of neoconservative strategies and their means of achieving them, for example 'the preemptive strike doctrine,' they do not vociferously refute the necessity of neoconservatisrn. In this light, neoconservative tendencies are not likely to be a fleeting phenomenon.