MUST READ: IS THE BUSH DOCTRINE DEAD?

Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?
by Norman Podhoretz

Epitaphs are multiplying for the President's revolutionary foreign policy; they remain premature.

In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the cold war being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain’s death—which, he famously said, had been “greatly exaggerated.” Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of Bush are now at it yet again. This time, however, their ranks have been swollen by a number of traditional conservatives who were never comfortable with the doctrine bearing his name and who have now moved from discomfort to outright opposition.

But what is genuinely new, and more surprising, is the entry into this picture of a significant number of my fellow neoconservatives. As the Bush Doctrine’s greatest enthusiasts, they would be much happier if they could go on pointing to signs of life, but so disillusioned have they become that a British journalist can say that, to them, “the words ‘Rice’ and ‘Bush’ have all but become the Beltway equivalent of barnyard expletives.” No wonder that they have now taken to composing obituary notices of their own.

Are we then to conclude that the latest reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine are not “greatly,” if indeed at all, exaggerated, and that it has at long last really been put to rest?

So misrepresented has the Bush Doctrine been that the only way to begin answering that question is to remind ourselves of what it actually says (and does not say); and the best way to do that is by going back to the speech in which it was originally enunciated: the President’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.

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