The United States-led invasion of Iraq and new war in Afghanistan are both applications of the Bush doctrine, which established a foreign policy founded on three pillars: unrivaled military supremacy, the concept of preemptive or preventive war, and a willingness to act unilaterally.
Are Obama supporters satisfied with the President's continuation of the Bush doctrine in Afghanistan?
The end of deterrence and containment
For almost 50 years, following the end of World War II (1939-1945) and the beginning of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy rested on the concepts of deterrence* and containment*. In a world dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), both armed with huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, the policy of deterrence relied on mutual assured destruction (MAD) to prevent the outbreak of a major war.
The policy of containment, first outlined by diplomat George Kennan in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"* represented the second pillar of U.S. foreign policy. It argued for the use of diplomacy backed by sufficient strength in conventional military forces to protect U.S. interests and prevent the USSR from expanding its realm of influence. (See Thematic Essay: History of American Foreign Policy.*)
With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States emerged as the world's sole superpower. Nevertheless, during the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, U.S. foreign policy continued to rely on concepts of both deterrence and containment.
Justification for the Bush doctrine
All this changed under the administration of George W. Bush, and the full contours of the new Bush doctrine became apparent in September 2002 with the publication of "The National Security Strategy of the United States." As outlined in this position paper, U.S. foreign policy rests on three main pillars: a doctrine of unrivaled military supremacy, the concept of preemptive or preventive war, and a willingness to act unilaterally if multilateral cooperation cannot be achieved.
President Bush argued that the new policy was necessary to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among rogue states and terrorist groups. The policy of deterrence, he maintained, was no longer sufficient to prevent a rogue nation or terrorist organization from using nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
"Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first....Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness."
