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REVIEW More pro-Bush than
Bush In Defense of the Bush
Doctrine by Robert G
Kaufman
Reviewed by Colin Dueck
In the wake of September 11, 2001, US
President George W Bush settled on a stated
foreign-policy doctrine embracing the preventive
and, if necessary, unilateral use of force against
"rogue states" such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
This doctrine was justified by referring to a new
age of catastrophic terrorism; it was also framed
in terms of traditional US goals of democracy
promotion overseas. In his new
book In Defense of the Bush Doctrine,
Robert Kaufman's aim is to provide both a
conceptual and a historical basis for defending
the underlying premises of the Bush Doctrine.
Kaufman, a professor of public policy at
Pepperdine University in California, lays out an
overarching foreign-policy approach he calls
"moral democratic realism". The "realism" element
lies in an appreciation of the
perennially anarchic, dangerous features of world
politics, where the use of force - including its
preventive use - is therefore sometimes necessary
to provide security.
The "democratic"
element lies in the belief that the spread of
liberal democracy makes the world a freer, safer
and more prosperous place; in contrast,
undemocratic regimes represent an existential
threat to US values as well as US interests. The
"moral" element lies in the claim that ordinary
standards of Judeo-Christian morality can be
applied to international relations, no less than
to everyday life. Concepts of good and evil are
not out of place in world politics.
Kaufman contrasts moral democratic realism
to three other schools of thought: isolationism,
liberal multilateralism, and realism. The defining
feature of isolationism in the US context has been
its rejection of a system of US-led bases and
alliances in Europe, East Asia and the Middle
East. He naturally identifies isolationism with
the record of US diplomacy in the inter-war years
- a disaster for everyone involved.
Liberal multilateralism is suspicious of
the use of force, committed to the promotion of
multilateral institutions and attracted to the use
of "soft power". He associates this school
particularly with post-Vietnam War Democrats and
especially the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Finally, realists of various types - according to
Kaufman - while obviously appreciative of the
anarchic features of world politics, fail to
recognize the importance of ideology, regime type
and morality in international affairs.
He
believes it was really the foreign-policy team of
the late president Richard Nixon and his secretary
of state, Henry Kissinger, that initiated a period
of US weakness, with their willingness to
accommodate Soviet power and their purely realist
emphasis on power politics as opposed to the
internal nature of the Soviet regime. While the
criticism of Carter as a weak foreign-policy
president is accurate enough, Kaufman's
characterization of Nixon and Kissinger turns out
to be something of a straw man.
In
contrast, he identifies presidents such as Harry
Truman and Ronald Reagan with "moral democratic
realism". Truman embodied a new and more muscular
approach by the late 1940s, calling for the
vigilant containment of the Soviet Union. Reagan
embarked on a campaign to pressure the Soviet
Union on every front - military, economic and
ideological. Unlike his predecessors, Reagan
believed that it was the USSR and not the United
States that was most vulnerable.
Through a
combination of increased military spending,
missile deployments to Western Europe, the
Strategic Defense Initiative, support for
anti-communist insurgents and psychological
warfare, Kaufman argues, Reagan gave Moscow no
choice but eventually to retrench and concede. In
sum, presidents such as Truman and Reagan were
successful in that they combined a realistic sense
of power politics with a moral-democratic
appreciation for ideology and regime type.
Presidents who only did one or the other -
such as the liberal multilateralist Carter or the
realist Nixon - were, according to Kaufman, much
less successful. In essence, Kaufman wants to
argue that there is a single successful US
foreign-policy tradition since World War II; that
it includes, notably, Truman and Reagan; and that
the current president is its legitimate heir,
rather than realist critics on the one hand and
liberal multilateralists on the other.
Two
things in this book may be most interesting to
readers of The National Interest. The first is
Kaufman's energetic defense of policies that even
the Bush administration has itself begun to back
away from. The author remains adamant that the
invasion of Iraq was necessary to undercut support
for terrorism within the Middle East.
Containment, he says, was simply not
working in relation to the late Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, Kaufman defends the
invasion of Iraq as not only right and necessary,
but as having been conducted in the right way. The
outcome, he suggests, has been progress toward
democracy throughout the Middle East, together
with enhanced credibility for US power. Kaufman
opposes any relaxation of effort in Iraq. He also
looks for continued pressure, rather than
negotiations, on the North Korean and Iranian
nuclear issues.
He advocates vigilant
containment and preventive military actions, if
necessary, to bring about the goals of
non-proliferation and regime change. More
generally, he supports a foreign policy based on
clear assumptions of US primacy, skepticism toward
the United Nations, energetic democracy promotion,
and a forward military presence overseas.
The second point of interest is his
sweeping critique of realists in both the policy
and the academic world. He argues that whether in
their classical or contemporary form, realists
such as George Kennan, Kenneth Waltz, Henry
Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft have been
consistently wrong about the nature of
international relations, and therefore positively
harmful to US foreign policy.
Among their
supposed failings are: skepticism regarding the
promotion of democracy overseas; a presumption
against the early use of force; a belief that
unipolarity is evanescent; a belief that all
states are alike; a dismissal of ideology and
regime type as insignificant in world politics; an
underestimation of man's capacity for devotion to
the larger good; a willingness to let the balance
of power operate without US aid; a belief that
foreign policy should focus only on vital
interests; a record in defense of the appeasement
of Adolf Hitler; opposition to the 1991 Gulf War;
opposition to the 2003 Iraq war; a current
willingness to engage in diplomacy with North
Korea and Iran; and a retreat into what Kaufman
calls the abyss of moral relativism.
The
administrations identified by Kaufman as
characteristically realist include not only the
Nixon-Kissinger team, but also the administration
of George H W Bush. Brent Scowcroft, Bush Sr's
national security adviser, endures special
criticism from Kaufman for having valued stability
over democracy promotion in both the Soviet Union
and the Middle East from 1989 to 1992.
Let
me begin by saying where Kaufman is right. He is
right to reject any sweeping disengagement from
America's strategic commitments overseas. He is
right to say that America's global presence
provides certain indispensable public goods
internationally. He is right to portray
contemporary liberals as all too frequently wedded
to a vision of multilateral institutions that has
little relationship to international politics as
it actually exists.
He is right to say
that many of the criticisms leveled against
President Bush as well as the war in Iraq have
been overdone, wrongheaded or even hysterical. But
contra Kaufman, the fact that Bush's critics have
often been wrong does not make the Bush Doctrine
specifically the right one for the United States.
Considering that even most
neo-conservatives have long since abandoned any
attempt to argue that the Iraq war was well
managed, it is genuinely surprising to come across
a reasonably thoughtful author - and Kaufman is
one - still willing to defend Bush absolutely to
the hilt. Amazingly, Kaufman will not even concede
that the Iraq war was badly managed: he calls it a
sound application of a sound doctrine.
In
a way, this is actually more pro-Bush than Bush
himself, since the president has since admitted
that certain key decisions in Iraq were
ill-advised. In fact, for a book titled In
Defense of the Bush Doctrine, the author
spends surprisingly few pages directly discussing
the practical application of that doctrine. All
Kaufman will say is that Iraq, like the region in
general, continues to make good progress toward
democracy as a result of the US invasion.
It is almost as if continually
deteriorating events on the ground have no ability
to penetrate the mental precincts of the war's
most
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appreciation of the
perennially anarchic, dangerous features of world
politics, where the use of force - including its
preventive use - is therefore sometimes necessary
to provide security. 
