Bush Doctrine Research Articles

Тенденции развития внешней политики США конца XX − первой четверти XXI века. Концептуальный аспект

This article analyses trends in US foreign policy of the late 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries as a major factor influencing modern geopolitics. The problem is considered in the theoretical aspect and in the historical-political retrospect, from the 1990s to the present day. The subject of the analysis is the stages of the formation of the foreign policy doctrine upheld by the USA in international relations. For the 1990s, the paper studies the doctrines asserting hegemony and unipolarity as the goals of US foreign policy in the geopolitical realities that took shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period of 2000s – 2010s was, according to the author, a time of transformation in US foreign policy: from the adoption after September 11, 2001 of the so-called Bush Doctrine, giving the USA rights to launch preventive strikes and make interventions against states suspected of cooperation with international terrorist organizations, to the idea of abandoning claims to global hegemony and attempts to normalize relations with Russia (“reset” policy) and China (the Group of Two) during Barack Obama’s presidency. The final part of the article examines the period of Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies, when the USA returned to the idea of global hegemony, based on the ideological thesis that the USA is the leader of the free world opposing the world of autocracies, whose leaders are Russia and China. According to the author, the current situation reproduces the realities of the Cold War, with the confrontation between the USA as the “defender of the free world” and the USSR as the founder of the world communism movement. The author concludes by attempting to determine the reasons for the transformations in US foreign policy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as well as to give a forecast of its development trends.

Post-9/11 US thinking and approaches to nuclear deterrence: the Bush Doctrine and the role of nuclear weapons in US deterrence strategy

Charting a course through US administrations from the late 1990s to the present day, this article considers the George W. Bush administration’s thinking on nuclear deterrence in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11: What was distinctive about the Bush administration’s thinking and approach to nuclear deterrence? To what extent, and to what effect have the Bush administration’s approaches proved enduring? The article considers the prima facie contradictory nature of the administration’s deterrence objectives against the backdrop of a shifting security environment, characterised by the proliferation of WMDs to ‘rogue states’ and non-state actors, nuclear multipolarity, disruptive emerging technologies, and long-held US commitments to its global allies and partners—ensuring the centrality of nuclear weapons in US national security policy, despite sustained efforts to reduce this reliance.

The Bush Doctrine redux: changes and continuities in American grand strategy since ‘9/11’

This article examines the ideational dimension and political performance of American grand strategy since ‘9/11’ and explores to what extent the strategic assumptions, ideological dispositions, and security practices of the Bush Doctrine have endured since the 2001 terrorist attacks. It advances a constructivist understanding of American grand strategy as a nexus of national identity discourses and security practices. The article will first explore the significance of American exceptionalism in the ideational dimension of the Bush Doctrine and its practical impact in the pursuit of US national security. The article will then focus on the Obama Doctrine, arguing that its embrace of cooperative engagement and multilateralism represented a limited strategic course correction within the paradigm of liberal hegemony. Finally, the article will contrast grand strategy discourses under Bush and Donald Trump, exploring their shared foundations in Jacksonian nationalism and unilateralism that demonstrate the continued relevance of Bush’s strategic vision of US primacy.

The War on Terror: The Neo-American Manifest Destiny

Significant literature has concluded that Islamic-terrorist activity in the Middle East and in Europe had increased drastically since the beginning of the implementation of the Bush Doctrine in 2001 after 9/11, with the rise of ISIS. However, little is known about the causal mechanism that links between the Post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the rise of new terrorist organizations, particularly the Islamic State in Iraq. Hence, the focus of this study is to process trace such mechanism. It will also explain why the War on Terror has produced totally opposite results from those it was originally intended for. Finally, this study is a within-case analysis that might be a microscopic observation of the imperial American behavior in the Middle East. This study relies on explaining outcome process-tracing methodology, and employing oral and historical accounts, archives and statistical data. I argue that the War on Terror, precisely the period of the Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), to be the continuity of the historical imperial behavior that inspires the U.S. foreign policy. I will only focus on two main policies: the Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003 because invasion is the most concrete manifestation of imperialism. The result shows that the invasion of Iraq led to sectarianism that IS feeds on, and that the invasion of Afghanistan led to the geographical expansion of Jihadists. Together they fused to cause the mutation of Al-Qaeda into a more complex Islamic-inspired terrorist organization (IS).

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

George W. Bush Yönetimi Kamu Diplomasisi: 11 Eylül ve Teröre Karşı Savaş

The terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 are events that profoundly affected the national security of the United States, changed the political landscape of the world, and put terrorism on the primary agenda of United States security policy. President George W. Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror after 9/11 is an approach that changed the course of the world in global political relations. The War on Terror, a multidimensional action, took the form of a conceptual framework for national security and was an effort to establish and maintain a global coalition on the axis of expanding cooperation. In the motives required by the discursive reactions, the War on Terror has revealed a cause-effect relationship in terms of shaping the ideas and being understood by the masses, and has been described as a step that legitimizes international policies. In public diplomacy regarding the security interests of the United States, the War on Terror has become a comprehensive public diplomacy campaign against anti-Americanism. In this context, the War on Terror is a rhetorical basis for Bush administration public diplomacy. During the Bush administration, the War on Terror, which was an act of reminder for the values of the country and used to distinguish themselves from their enemies, gained importance for the creation of unity and strength across the country. In this study, the reflection of the 9/11 attacks on public diplomacy, the War on Terror strategy and the Bush Doctrine are addressed. At the same time, the rhetoric of the War on Terror in the formation of the value judgments of the masses and the implementation of the policies is examined from the perspective of public diplomacy.

From Melting Pot to Islamophobia: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

America was founded on the idea of the melting pot that guarantees success, an opportunity to prosperity and social upward regardless of race, religion or status at birth. After the events of 9/11, the idealized notion of the melting pot was abandoned. Therefore, another version of America initiates fueled by post-9/11 xenophobia and President Bush administration’s “war on terror” launched on the pretext of promoting democracy. The Bush Doctrine, however, represented terrorism as a cause rather than an effect of the long history of Western colonization, oppression and manipulation of the Muslim World. This is exactly where the importance of Mohsin Hamid’ novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), is manifested to challenge and subvert the dominant post-9/11 discourse. In Hamid’s novel the “Other” is directly represented, not through the Orientalist discourse, but through an Easterner who changes his allegiance from a believer in and proponent of the neoliberal capitalist version of the American Dream to a skeptic and opponent of USA economic and political foreign policy. Therefore, this research argues that Hamid’s novel attempts to delineate the discourses of Islamophobia, capitalism, economic and political domination of the west, and fundamentalism in context of 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.

Understanding Iraq’s Persistent Domestic Instability: A Revisit to the 2003 Iraq War and the Effect of the US Foreign Policy.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the heart of the United States (US), the US policymakers implemented a new doctrine known as the Bush Doctrine and declared war on any country in the international system which has a connection with terrorism or shelters the terrorists. In line with this, Iraq became one of “the target countries” on the axis of the new US doctrine. They took a further step and invaded Iraq with their allies in 2003 by claiming that they would liberate the Iraqi people from the authoritarian regime and bring democracy to Iraq. Toppling Saddam Hussein, the US implemented a new political regime in the country. In the post-Saddam regime, Iraq’s new ruling elites were mainly chosen from the Shiites. On the other hand, the Sunnis stayed at the periphery of the emerging Iraqi political system. The US political manoeuvres triggered ethnic and sectarian (ethno-sectarian) segregation as well as a tense political environment in Iraq. To put it clearly, the practices of the US foreign policy in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war/invasion not only inflamed the conflicts/divide between the major Islamic sects (the Sunni and the Shiite Muslims) but also widened “the ethnic rift”, mainly between the Kurds and the Arabs in the country. The ethno-sectarian segregation among the Iraqi people highly affected the domestic political stability in the country. Depending on the scientific data in the field, this research has mainly revealed that the 2013 US-led military invasion/Iraq War and the US policy towards Iraq had an impact on the persistent domestic instability in Iraq.

The US-led “War on Terror” in Afghanistan: 2001-2021

During Cold War era, the US supported the armed groups in Afghanistan in terms of training and ammunition against the Soviet Union by fuelling Islamic jihadism. After failed invasion of Soviet Union, the US withdrew completely leaving the armed groups from the region and it created a threat to the whole world. The US became one of the biggest targets and victims of its own policy with 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan was one of the countries the US occupied in order to fight against terrorist organizations and to bring democracy to countries that feed and support terrorism within the framework of the Bush Doctrine. The US did not carry out this invasion alone and for the first time in its history, NATO took action within the scope of Article 5 and engaged in a collective intervention. The point reached at the end of the 20-year invasion, where humanitarian loss and economic costs are too heavy to be overcome, the US, who sat at the table with the Taliban, quickly retreated from the region by leaving everything else -once again- just as how it was while disappointing its NATO allies.

PAK-US BILATERAL RELATIONS UNDER BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Pak-US relations under Bush administration historically reached at its peak. It was the result of his doctrine known as ‘Bush Doctrine’. It resulted in constituting a fundamental shift in US foreign policy. This work tried to dig out that how Bush decided to framed his own strategies and way of using power and influence for the pursuit of USA national interests. Unlike president Clinton, president Bush focused on securing geo-strategic rather geo-economic interests. It is also tried to high light that what compelled Bush administration to tilt towards Pakistan. It includes especially inexorable geographical position of Pakistan in the region, so was preferred by US policy makers in this region. Bush even ignored US policy to promote democracy and supported undemocratic rule of General Pervez Musharraf, as his rule was inevitable to secure US national interests in the region. Authorities in Pakistan promised to assist US in its war on terror. It was the same role of Pakistan for which it was given the status of non- NATO ally. Bush Administration in return offered economic and military assistance to Pakistan. This study is based on qualitative insight to find out the real face of Pak-US relations under Bush administration. Secondary data including reports of different institutions, books, research articles and analysis by several scholars have been approached to furnish this work.

Book Review: “WILL THIS BE CHINA’S CENTURY?”

Mel Gurtov is the editor of chief of Journal Asian Perspective and professor of Political Science at Poland State University. He has many published pieces including Prospects for security and Cooperation in East Asia, Global Politics in the Human Interest (also published in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese) and Superpower on Crusade: The Bush Doctrine in US Foreign Policy, and Pacific Asia?

Legal Status of Enemy Combatants under International Humanitarian Law

The September 11 attacks conducted by Al-Qaeda had a substantial impact on the U.S security paraphernalia. It also greatly impacted the global security milieu as the transnational ideology of Islamic radicalism and Jihad challenged the security apparatus of the entire world. To counter this new challenge of radical Islamic militancy which operated beyond the boundaries of a single state, President Bush declared a Global War on Terror, and these actors were designated as the primary enemy of the United States, the West, and the liberal values of freedom, peace and democracy. Under the Bush Doctrine, these radical Islamic terrorists were proclaimed as ‘Enemy Combatants’ and were deprived off of their legal rights as prisoner of war as guaranteed by the International Humanitarian Law. The real challenge lies in determining the legal status of these proclaimed ‘Enemy Combatants’ and the humanitarian crisis that emerged due to the introduction of this concept. Therefore, this research paper attempts to analyze the legal status of Taliban as well as Al-Qaeda under the framework of International Humanitarian Law including the Geneva Convention, Additional Protocols of 1977, and the Vienna Convention as well as the Customary Law including Pashtun-Wali. This paper also endeavors to highlight the humanitarian crisis that emerged as a result of the introduction of the concept of ‘Enemy Combatants’.

Welcome to Decision Points Theater: Rhetoric, Museology, and Game Studies

This essay analyzes Decision Points, an interactive exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and illustrates how it leverages the digital properties of videogames to make an argument for the necessity of the Bush Doctrine. Starting with how the museum’s material and spatial environment builds identification between visitors and Bush, the piece proceeds to show how the exhibit relies on the affordances of digital environments to characterize Bush’s decision-making process as complex. Focusing on the exhibit’s simulation of the War in Iraq, I argue that rhetorical studies will need to account for the persuasive capacities of videogames in memory places in order to help visitors become more aware of and responsive to the rhetorical claims they encode. This necessity opens possibility spaces for collaboration between the fields of rhetoric, museology, and game studies.

미국 대통령의 헌법상 전쟁권한에 대한 국제법 규범 통합에 의한 입법적 규제

The U.S. Constitution accords the President the power to serve as the commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces and also grants the Congress the power to declare war and the power to provide for and maintain military forces and traditionally brought about debates on the division of war powers between the President and the Congress. The key issue is whether either the President or the Congress has the superior war power. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 spurred the Bush doctrine. As the debates go through the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the pendulum has considerably swung to the president-centered view.BR In international law, the use of armed force by a state is generally prohibited under UN Charter Article 2(4) and only exceptionally allowed in such a case as self-defense under UN Charter Article 51. The Bush doctrine has caused serious controversies because its underpinning is the expansive view of the right to self-defense: the pre-emptive self-defense. The Bush doctrine justifies the use of force even in the absence of, or not necessarily in an immediate response to, armed attack by a state.BR The U.S. Constitution does not clearly set out whether the President can initiate war in the absence of congressional declaration of war and has left the question unsettled. In practice, the President has exercised his war power expansively and initiated almost all of the wars that the United Stated conducted thus far. This practice has been supported by the inherent prerogative theory and the theory of repetition-based validity.BR In addressing the question of the division of war powers, Judge Jackson’s three-prong test has been able to shed lights on the issue of the constitutionality of the president’s exercise of war powers. This test sets forth three kinds of situation when the constitutionality of the president’s exercise of war power is debated. The President may exercise the war power (i) in pursuance of congressional permission, whether explicit or implicit, (ii) in the absence of congressional permission or opposition, or (iii) in defiance of congressional intention, whether explicit or implicit. Through these three situations, the presumption of constitutionality of the President’s power ranges from the maximum to the minimum.BR The U.S. Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in order to restrain the President’s exercise of war powers and also passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force(AUMF) in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The critical loophole has been that the Supreme Court in practice has avoided to carry out the judicial review on presidential acts of war on the basis of the political question doctrine.BR Given that the UN Charter and rules of international law specify conditions under which the right of self-defense can be limitedly exercised, an alternative way of restraining the president’s exercise of war power may be to incorporate such rules as necessity and proportionality into domestic legislations. It can harmonize both the needs for addressing new security threats such as terrorism and the regulatory demand for restraining the use of armed force, in a manner that respects the principle of separation of powers and the principle of checks and balances.

Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings

“Screening Prophetic Machines” argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the “prophetic machine,” which fuse preemption's speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report's politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film's multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson's work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.

WOJNA W IRAKU W ŚWIETLE DOKTRYNY BUSHA

The article presents changes in American foreign policy after 11th 2001 and is concerned the George W. Bush’s Middle East policy. The goal of the text is presenting how the Bush doctrine leaded to war in Iraq. After the short introduction about US Middle East policy the text explains fundamental parts of doctrine and describes the most important G. W. Bush speeches and National Security Strategies from 2002 and 2006. This part is dedicated on war on terror, axis of evil and preventive war. The next part try to identify actual and the official and publically stated causes the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The article ends with the analysis the cost of Iraq war.

Freedom to Struggle: The Ironies of Colson Whitehead

This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead. I begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing. I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016). I argue that in Apex—published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Whitehead treats freedom ironically. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture—particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for African Americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction.

Pre-emptive war under international law

PRE-EMPTIVE WAR UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW The thesis is devoted to problems associated with the international legal regulation of pre-emptive war. It is quite obvious that this phenomenon has a logical context revealed in national security policies individual states pursue for themselves. In this regard, analysis was made of the prerequisites for the emergence of a new doctrine of pre-emptive war, and here analysis of the “Bush Doctrine” made it possible to reveal the characteristics of pre-emptive war. In addition, the article pays precise attention to the problem of correlation between the characteristics of pre-emptive war and preventive war. It has been separately established that the current stage of international legaliz­ation of pre-emptive war requires significant improvement in mechanisms preventing this phenom­enon and the development of a system of sanctions. Important conclusions are drawn regarding the prospects for international consolidation and implementation of the pre-emptive war doctrine in the systems of international law.

Furthering the ‘war on terrorism’ through international law: how the United States and the United Kingdom resurrected the Bush doctrine on using preventive military force to combat terrorism

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the Principles Relevant to the Scope of a State’s Right of Self-Defense Against an Imminent or Actual Armed Attack by Nonstate Actors published by Sir Daniel Bethlehem in the American Journal of International Law in 2012. As disclosed in documents revealed by WikiLeaks, the principles were the product of intergovernmental discussions led by the United States to secure greater understanding of the jus ad bellum that had their origins in the controversial ‘Bush doctrine’ published in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America in 2002. In 2017, the UK Attorney General announced that the UK ‘follows and endorses’ Principle 8 of ‘The Bethlehem Principles’, as did Australia’s Attorney General. Principle 8 reflects an expansion of the right of anticipatory self-defence by providing a new standard of imminence to enable preventive military strikes against threats outside traditional conflict zones.

U.S. national security strategies: Patterns of continuity and change, 1987–2015

ABSTRACTWhat are the patterns of continuity and change in U.S. national security strategies? This article addresses this question by analyzing three major national-security and foreign-policy considerations: problems of definition, the ends of national interest, and the means of achieving them. Part I analyzes national security strategies published between 2002 and 2015. Part II compares the post–September 11, 2001, era with the 1987–2001 period. Across 28 years, 16 national security strategies and five presidencies, this research finds considerable continuity in problem definition and national-interest ends, and surprising continuity in means, even among the most controversial parts of the Bush Doctrine.