Doctrinal faith.

• Author: Dueck, Colin
• Position: Book review

Robert G. Kaufman, In Defense of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 240 pp., $35.00.

IN THE wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration settled on a stated foreign-policy doctrine embracing the preventive and, if necessary, unilateral use of force against "rogue states" such as Iraq, Dan and North Korea. This doctrine was justified by referring to a new age of catastrophic terrorism; it was also flamed in terms of traditional American goals of democracy promotion overseas. In this new book, Robert Kaufman's aim is to provide both a conceptual and historical basis for defending the underlying premises of the Bush Doctrine.

Kaufman, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, lays out an overarching foreign-policy approach he calls "moral democratic realism." The "realism" element lies in an appreciation of the perennially anarchic, dangerous features of world politics, where the use of force--including its preventive use--is therefore sometimes necessary to provide security. The "democratic" element lies in the belief that the spread of liberal democracy makes the world a fleer, safer and more prosperous place; in contrast, undemocratic regimes represent an existential threat to American values as well as American interests. The "moral" element lies in the claim that ordinary standards of Judeo-Christian morality can be applied to international relations, no less than to everyday life. Concepts of good and evil are not out of place in world politics.

Kaufman contrasts moral democratic realism to three other schools of thought: isolationism, liberal multilateralism and realism. The defining feature of isolationism in the American context has been its rejection of a system of U.S.-led bases and alliances in Europe, east Asia and the Middle East. He naturally identifies isolationism with the record of American diplomacy in the interwar years--a disaster for everyone involved. Liberal multilateralism is suspicious of the use of force, committed to the promotion of multilateral institutions and attracted to the use of "soft power." He associates this school particularly with post-Vietnam Democrats and especially the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Finally, realists of various types--according to Kaufman--while obviously appreciative of the anarchic features of world politics, fail to recognize the importance of ideology, regime type and morality in international affairs. He believes it was really the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy team that initiated a period of American weakness, with their willingness to accommodate Soviet power and their purely realist emphasis on power politics as opposed to the internal nature of the Soviet regime. While the criticism of Carter as a weak foreign-policy president is accurate enough, Kaufman's characterization of Nixon and Kissinger turns out to be something of a straw man.

In contrast, he identifies presidents such as Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan with "moral democratic realism." Truman embodied a new and more muscular approach by the late 1940s, calling for the vigilant containment of the Soviet Union. Reagan embarked on a campaign to pressure the Soviet Union on every front--military, economic and ideological. Unlike his predecessors, Reagan believed that it was the USSR and not the United States that was most vulnerable. Through a combination of increased military spending, missile deployments to Western Europe, the Strategic Defense Initiative, support for anti-communist insurgents and psychological warfare, Kaufman argues, Reagan gave Moscow no choice but to eventually retrench and concede. In sum, presidents such as Truman and Reagan were successful in that they combined a realistic sense of power politics with a...