Ideology and US Foreign Policy: Foreign Policy under George W. Bush

Abstract

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre changed United States of America’s National Security Strategy from deterrence and containment to pre-emption. This new strategy of combating new security challenges, allows them the opportunity to secure US against countries that harbour or give aid to terrorist groups pre-emptively. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emption as formulated in the National Security Strategy (NSS) after the 9/11 attack goes beyond narrow principle pre-emption, but reserves the right to US to attack pre-emptively even without a definite and imminent threat. The war in Iraq is most bothersome in the implementation of the doctrine. Customary international law permits pre-emptive self-defence only when a threat is so grave and imminent. In spite of this, the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption calls for anticipatory self-defence against international law as a way of fighting terrorist group and havens of terrorism. However, the doctrine has encouraged attacks on less powerful nations by more powerful nations, spread of terrorists groups, and emergence of insurgencies and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction across national borders. This study therefore seeks to find whether Bush Doctrine promoted democracy or pursued hegemonic position in the Middle-East region. The research will be a descriptive analysis. It utilizes qualitative data gathered from secondary sources such as scholarly articles, magazines, newspapers, books published by local and international authors. Strategic and ideological interests are quantified utilizing content analysis data collected from foreign policy speeches that President George W. Bush delivered from September 11, 2001 to March 19, 2003. The data and speeches are evaluated to classify the Bush strategy as realist, liberal or neoconservative and to determine whether the Bush Doctrine represents change or continuity in US foreign policy.