Book Review: Was Bush Doctrine Just a Little Bit of History Repeating?

[laststeamtrain]

Was Bush Doctrine Just a Little Bit of History Repeating?

Daniel Luban

NEW YORK, Feb 16 (IPS) - Was the foreign policy of George W. Bush an aberration in U.S. history, a turn away from the traditional guiding principles of U.S. foreign policy towards messianic ambitions of permanent supremacy and universal democracy?
Or did the Bush years merely demonstrate, in exaggerated form, impulses that were already present in the U.S.'s dominant foreign policy traditions? Particularly, was the Iraq war an expression or a betrayal of the liberal internationalist tradition of President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)?

These questions have taken on special relevance given the high hopes attached to the inauguration of Barack Obama. If his administration will mark a return to the U.S.'s liberal internationalist heritage, as Obama seemed to suggest in his inaugural address, will this be sufficient to avoid future debacles of the sort that marked the Bush years?

In the new anthology "The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton, 2009), four prominent U.S. political scientists - G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Knock, Tony Smith, and Anne-Marie Slaughter - debate these questions. Knock and Slaughter aim to defend the liberal internationalist tradition and differentiate it from Bush's foreign policy, while Smith argues that liberal internationalism actually set the stage for Bush and the neoconservatives.

What this thought-provoking but ultimately frustrating volume demonstrates, however, is how little consensus there is about what Bush really represented - or, for that matter, what Wilson really represented. With so little agreement about the basic terms of debate, there are few satisfying conclusions to be drawn about how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past eight years.

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If Wilsonianism is fundamentally about multilateralism, then the (relatively) unilateral Iraq war would fail to qualify as Wilsonian. But if Wilsonianism is fundamentally about democracy promotion, this might seem to open the door to democratisation by force of arms, as in Iraq.

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[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, I think it's pretty clear that what the Bush Junta did was to rip the detainee hood

from off our heads, so that we could see where the United States has been going for some time.

I recently revisited the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations of the 1960s--a period of history I lived through--via James Douglass' cathartic book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," published last year by the Maryknoll fathers,

Let's stop right there. 1963. Nevermind Woodrow Wilson and the two world cataclysms--presided over by Democratic presidents, I feel moved to add. Let's talk about the "Cold War" that needn't have been, and the two million people slaughtered in Southeast Asia that needn't have been, had the president who wanted to stop them not been assassinated by our own secret government on behalf of our "military-industrial complex."

The Bush Junta is a result of that. We never dealt with that. The wool was pulled over our eyes about that. The question of where we are now, after the Bush Junta, is a question that cannot be understood, and that cannot be answered, until we deal with that. That is the bridge to the past that got blown up.