To Usher in a New Paradigm? President Bush's Foreign Policy Legacy

Abstract

The exact nature of George W. Bush's legacy will be contingent on how his successors react to the policies his administration offered. Even then, however, a legacy is not easy to pin down. Bush's legacy will be manipulated by future historians to advance or resist various contemporary political agendas. Indeed, the ‘Clinton legacy’ and, especially, the ‘Reagan legacy’ were important parts of the political discourse that helped Bush and his supporters define his administration. Despite these qualifications, there is a clear sense in which the Bush administration has been present at the creation of a new era of American foreign policy. The lesson that the Bush administration drew was that the United States was not only at war, but that it was engaged in a very different kind of war. This chapter examines Bush's foreign policy, his security policy and war on terror, America's doctrine of pre-emption, and promotion of democracy under the Bush regime.