ABSTRACT
The Cold War defined world order from the 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the strategy pursued by the United States throughout that period was based on the principles established under Truman. When it ended, it did so on something close to the basis that the Truman administration had hoped: the USSR, contained over decades by US pressure, struggled to maintain the vitality of its political and economic ideology in the eyes of its own people. Ultimately, even those at the top of the system came to favour a limited degree of liberalizing reform, beginning a chain of events that led to the revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet regime. This chapter focuses not on the immediate years of the ‘post-Cold War
era’, as it is often termed, but on the first administration of the twenty-first century: that of George W. Bush. Like many of his predecessors, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Bush was a state governor when he ran for national office. He was also the son of a president and grandson of a US Senator. Despite this combination of experience and pedigree, however, he came to the presidency with extremely limited knowledge of foreign affairs. Despite this fact – perhaps because of it – he went on to embrace a foreign policy during his first term of office that all analysts thought bold, and some considered revolutionary.1 Especially noted was the administration’s combination of ambitious activism abroad with a disposition favouring unilateral action. The chapter begins, as usual, by discussing national and international con-
text, before providing a brief survey of the way in which the Bush administration was assessed by its critics. It goes on to set out the central thrust of the administration’s strategic vision, headlined in the National Security Strategy of 2002 as the quest for a ‘balance of power that favours freedom’. This is then followed by a number of sections describing the key ideological elements of that strategy, namely: proclaiming the universal validity of liberal political values; linking international security to the spread of liberal democracy; asserting a fundamental commonality of interest between the world’s nations; distinguishing conceptually between peoples and governments; arguing that historical destiny mandated the triumph of the United States and its ideas; and claiming US military hegemony as a virtuous objective. Having thus
distilled the key features of the Bush strategy, drawing out in the process the evident parallels between Bush and the Wilson-Roosevelt-Truman tradition, the chapter then spells out point by point the alternative realist ‘road not taken’. In so doing, it makes clear that US policy under Bush has not been a simple cause-and-effect response to external circumstances, but a chosen course influenced by the embedded ideological traditions guiding America’s engagement with the international system. The purpose of the chapter, adding the final major component to the thesis
of the book as a whole, is to demonstrate the intellectual linkages that rooted the strategy pursued by Bush in the evolving tradition of America’s evolving internationalism. The argument is not that Bush’s strategy was indistinguishable from that of earlier presidents. His administration dealt with circumstances quite changed from those his predecessors faced, and consequently one would expect some change in policy. The argument, as in previous chapters, is that changing national and international circumstances called for a degree of change in American thinking about international order and the US global role. But the administration could only carry forward that change on the basis of some connection to the pre-existing ideological framework of US foreign policy making. Though it may have appeared radical – and in some ways it was – Bush administration policy in these years was in fact grounded in established principles of the American internationalist ideology, as evolved during the transition to global engagement via Roosevelt, Wilson and Truman. What emerged under Bush was in a sense new, but it was also the product of interaction between circumstances and ideological inheritance.
