The 2002 Bush Doctrine and the Pandora Box of the Preemptive War
The “War on Terror” (or “terrorism”) became a focal point of the 2002 Bush Doctrine and the cornerstone of his imagination on the preemptive war within the framework of international relations, however, at the time when the US was still a hyperpower in global politics [...]
Originally, the Bush Doctrine was a political phrase with the aim to describe the US foreign policy goals during the 43rd US President George W. Bush (Bush Junior), 2001−2009. The doctrine had four basic standpoints. All of them were centered around American military superiority after the Cold War 1.0 as the US being the only global hyperpower in international relations.
The Bush Doctrine’s fundamental standpoints
The fundamental standpoints of the Bush Doctrine are: 1) Unilateralism; 2) A logic of “either with us or with the terrorists”; 3) Pre-emption; and 4) Regime change.
It must be noted that the Bush Junior administration turned to the direction of a realist stance of “America First” to international engagement soon after taking office in January 2001 (before 9/11). Such policy became first expressed by the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol (signed on December 11th, 1997). Following the 9/11 case in New York and Washington, the Bush Junior administration combined unilateralist propensities with military interventionism that became directed at countries presumed to harbor terrorists – in other words, the pre-emptive wars. Therefore, in October 2001, Bush Junior started a war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan followed by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (accompanied by the UK) as declaratively part of the policy of the War on Terror.
There are three prominent texts in which the Bush Doctrine was codified and promulgated: 1) Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, which included the famous terminology of the “axis of evil” for the political purpose to mark North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as the focal enemies of the US; 2) The 2002 National Security Strategy which became technically updated in 2006; and 3) The 2003 President State of the Union Address.
George W. Bush Junior & Benito Mussolini
Concerning the first text, President Bush Junior got his idea for the phrase “axis of evil”, in fact, by combining the US President Ronald Reagan’s (who invaded the independent state of Grenada in 1983) description of the USSR as the “evil empire” (which kind of empire the US was is not clear by Reagan’s descriptions) with the term axis as used in WWII (Italy, Japan, and Germany). The term “axis” for the first time appeared in a speech in the cathedral of the Italian city of Milan by Benito Mussolini on November 1st, 1936. On that occasion, he described by the term the relations between Italy and Germany. At least from the very mathematical viewpoint, the term “axis” was suggesting that Italy and Germany saw Europe revolved around the line connecting Rome and Berlin (in practice more around Berlin than Rome) as a mathematical axis describes a straight line around which a geometric figure can rotate.
George W. Bush Junior & the Democrats
A Conservative-Republican George W Bush Junior’s doctrine had a key place in the “peace” theory of the US democrat party. The Bush Doctrine assumed that America must spread democracy all over the world (however, if democracy exists in the US is not clear!). The Bush Doctrine potentially predicts that, once democratic institutions exist in some country (for example in Iraq), democracy as a political system is going to be spread over to all neighboring states in the region, and subsequently all these countries would adopt democratic peaceful policies in international relations (nevertheless, why the US as “democratic” state is not adopting a peaceful policy in international relations is still not clear!). Nevertheless, since countries in transition to democracy may be more warlike than other regimes, efforts to spread democracy may, actually, lead to more wars – a typical example, in this case, can be the USA.
The “War on Terror” as a preemptive war
The “War on Terror” (or “terrorism”) became a focal point of the 2002 Bush Doctrine and the cornerstone of his imagination on the preemptive war within the framework of international relations, however, at the time when the US was still a hyperpower in global politics. Soon, within the circle of American policymakers, the idea became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT), referring to the efforts by the Pentagon and the key US allies (the Brits in the first place) to root out and finally destroy different groups of forces allegedly accused to be responsible for global terrorism. The first of such kind of preemptive wars launched by the US administration happened soon after 9/11 and it mapped a military strategy for a “Long War” that marked the focal security threats to global politics in the new (21st) century.
The concept of Bush’s preemptive war had the final aim to beat the historically new combination of threats posed by non-state actors and especially terrorist groups (which in the majority of cases fought against organized state [governmental] terrorism like Israel or Turkey). Nevertheless, all critics of the 2002 Bush concept of a preemptive “War on Terror” stressed that it, in fact, legitimized almost unlimited power in both foreign and domestic policies interventions and, subsequently, the concept and the whole doctrine have been building the proper political and propaganda atmosphere of fear and apprehension. In other words, the doctrine simply allowed the American and other Western governments to manipulate public opinion and create conditions for imperialistic military actions (what happened soon in Iraq, Libya, and Syria).
In essence, the doctrine of “War on Terror” was an umbrella by the US administration of George W. Bush Junior referring to the various military, political, and legal actions taken by the Pentagon and the US allies after the attack on 9/11 2001 in order to curb the spread of the terrorist way of struggle for political aims in general but, in fact, Islamic inspired terrorism in particular.
A Pandora Box of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war
By the academic definition, preemptive (or preventive) war is a such war that is initiated to gain an advantage over an enemy that is itself about to attack (Richard W. Mansbach, Kirsten L. Taylor, Introduction to Global Politics, Second edition, London−New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012, p. 582). Subsequently, the Russian (humanitarian and anti-Nazi) military intervention in East Ukraine which started in February 2020 is a typical preventive self-defense war (against Ukrainian state terror on the Russian-speaking minority and designed NATO military intervention against Russia. This Russian intervention is not lesser humanitarian as it was an officially explained NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 by NATO authorities). The question is: Who is the initiator of the modern view of the doctrine of preventive war? The answer is quite clear: the Bush administration in 2002. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war wrapped into the package of the “War on Terror” simply produced two decades later a boomerang effect and opened Pandora’s box in global politics with unpredictable consequences for the system of international relations and world peace.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex-University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The 2015 dataOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’.Fairytales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into sub consciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. ...
The Consequences of WWI and the YugoslavsThe end of WWI in November 1918 as a consequence of the military collapse of the Central Powers and the following series of peace treaties of Versailles on June 28th, 1919 between the Allies and Germany, of St Germain on September 10th, 1919 with Austria, of Neuilly on November 27th, 1919 with Bulgaria, and finally of Trianon on June 4th, 1920 with Hungary, produced major border changes in Central, South-East, and East Europe as the continent saw the emergence of several of new states and the enlargement of others fortunate enough to be on ...
Vladislav B. Sotirovic, “Who are the Albanians? The Illyrian Anthroponomy and the Ethnogenesis of the Albanians – A Challenge to Regional Security”, Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, Vol. 26, 2012, № 1−2, ISSN 0742-3330, 2015, Slavica Publishers, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, pp. 45−76Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on ...
"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible…”Harry S. Truman, 33rd POTUS, 1941Since the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois historiography has tried to distort various incidents in order to vilify Socialism and the USSR. One of these incidents- which has been a “banner” of imperialism’s apologists and other anticommunists- is the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact“* which was signed in 1939. In it’s unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents ...
Ever since the U.S. government dangled $160 million last December to combat Russian propaganda and disinformation, obscure academics and eager think tanks have been lining up for a shot at the loot, an unseemly rush to profit that is spreading the Russia-gate hysteria beyond the United States to Europe.Now, it seems that every development, which is unwelcomed by the Establishment – from Brexit to the Catalonia independence referendum – gets blamed on Russia! Russia! Russia! The methodology of these “studies” is to find some Twitter accounts or Facebook pages somehow “linked” to Russia (although it’s never exactly clear how that ...
In December last year [2015], NATO officially invited Montenegro to become the 29th member state of the most powerful military organisation of our times, if not, in fact, of all time. The country’s Prime Minister, Milo Đukanović, assured the NATO secretary-general that “you can count on us at any time.” It is always nice to hear that someone has your back. But in Montenegro’s case, it means that they have our back with an entire active-duty military force of only two thousand personnel. It is not quite clear how the tiny nation of less than 700,000 people enhances U.S. security ...
A Unified Europe: Born In the USAWhile Brexit versus the continuation of the European Union is a hot news topic, few know the secret who and why of the EU’s creation.The lead financial writer at the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, wrote in 2000:Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe.***The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE [below, we’ll explain who these players are] in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo ...
A NATO defense ministers meeting that took place in Brussels on November, 8-9 resulted in the new and very important decisions for the future of Europe.Speaking at a meeting, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said it is vital that European roads, ports, bridges and rail networks are able to carry tanks and heavy military equipment. Stoltenberg also added that NATO countries have agreed to cooperate to improve civil infrastructure objects to make them usable for military needs. What does it mean in practice for Europe in general and for the Baltic States in particular?Lithuanian authorities, for example, will for sure try ...
On 10 August 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump accused president Barak Hussein Obama and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of co-founding the jihadist rebel organization ISIS (Islamic State) operating mainly in Syria and Iraq but with operative in many Middle Eastern countries and around the world. Trump used Obama’s full name to provoke a racist-xenophobic response from the public about the Arabic-sounding name rooted in East Africa. Immediately, critics insisted that Trump made outrageous and ignorant comments about complex foreign affairs matters he does not fully comprehend.The following day Trump clarified that he meant exactly what he said and ...
As 2016 closes, we find ourselves a deeply unsettled nation. We’re unable to draw the lines of our national interest. Is it jobs and economy, is it national security, or is it now in our interest to ensure global security — in other words, act as the world’s policemen?As the “failing” (to quote Trump) New York Times degenerates into a Washington Post organization with its stagnant Cold War vision of a 1950s world where the Russians are to blame for most everything — Hillary’s loss, most of the aggression and disorder in the world, the desire to destabilize Europe, etc. — the Times has added the ...
Eighteen years ago in the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. “The operation was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker” according to Nebosja Malic.This article was first written in May 1999 at the height of the bombing of Yugoslavia.The causes and consequences of this war have been the object of a vast media disinformation campaign, which has sought to camouflage NATO and US war crimes.It is important to note that a large segment of the “Progressive Left” in Western Europe and North America were part of this disinformation campaign, presenting ...
TRANSCRIPT:Harold Channer (HC): Good evening and welcome very, very much to the conversation. We’re pleased to welcome to the program, Sean Gervasi. He is a professor and academic who is concerned with economics and particularly with what is relevant to what we want to talk about tonight. He has just returned from a long stay in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and knows something of that situation. Sean Gervasi, welcome very, very much to the conversation, and back to New York. Before we go into some detail about what in the world is going on in terms of the Balkans, from your experience ...
As Europe’s longest ruler, it is a surprise that Milo Djukanovic is only 58. He has served as prime minister or president of various iterations of Montenegro since 1991 – spanning the collapse of Yugoslavia and across and beyond independence of the nation in 2006.What is the secret to Mr Djukanovic’s success? The answer is depressingly predictable: clientelism and the buying – or, depending on your perspective, stealing – of power.The beauty of Montenegro hides this ugly truth. Most know it as a tourist idyll with pristine beaches, crystal lakes and picturesque mountains. But holidaymakers rarely realize they enter less ...
The armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serbian forces started in 1992 with the KLA attacks on Serbian police officers, non-Albanians that lived in Kosovo and Albanians loyal to Serbia (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999). This low level conflict escalated in 1996 with the KLA attacking refugee camps as well as other civilians and policemen resulting in dozens of innocent deaths (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999). At this point of time and all up to late 1998, the KLA was regarded as a terrorist organisation (Gelbard, cited in Parenti, 2000:99; Jatras, 2002; Johnstone, 2002; Kepruner, 2003; Rubin, cited in ...
Croatia's President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic with Croatian diaspora in Canada holding the flag of WWII Nazi-Ustashi Independent State of CroatiaCroatia’s president, the former deputy NATO secretary general for public diplomacy Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, decided to pay homage to Nazis of the Ustasha Nazi puppet regime of Croatia shot by Yugoslav partisans at the end of World War II. Grabar-Kitarovic’s tone deafness in choosing Victory in Europe week to honor dead Nazis shocked the Balkans and the rest of Europe.The Ustasha, along with their Slovenian and Serb loyalists to the Nazi puppet regime, were killed by the partisans under the command of anti-fascist ...
Was Serbia attacked in 1999? To answer that question, Milica-Hänsel Radojkovic draws on period documents (including Willy Wimmer’s letter to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder). He highlights the unacceptability of the Rambouillet proposals, designed to justify a war that had already started. Fourteen years ago, after the negotiation conferences in Rambouillet and Paris between 6th and 23rd February 1999, the global media informed the general public that “the Serbian delegation did not accept the offered agreement and rather qualified it as null and void”, while indicating that allegedly the so-called Contact Group for Yugoslavia stood behind the agreement. This body consisted of ...
Seventy-five years ago Adolf Hitler launched the biggest and most destructive military campaign in history when three million German and allied troops invaded the Soviet Union along a 1,000-mile front.Operation Barbarossa – the codename for the German invasion of Russia - was no ordinary military campaign: it was an ideological and racist war, a war of destruction and extermination that aimed to kill Jews, enslave the Slavic peoples and destroy communism. The result was a war in which 25 million Soviet citizens died, including a million Jews, executed by the SS in 1941-1942 – an action which became the template ...
15 June 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta by King John at Runnymede. Magna Carta notably gave English “free men” freedom from arbitrary, non-judicial imprisonment, dispossession, outlawing, banishment or destruction by the ruler, a freedom that was variously progressively extended to all citizens and subjects in the Anglosphere over the next 8 centuries. However the US, UK, Apartheid Israel, and Australia have continued to grossly violate this freedom in the 21st century.King John I of England reluctantly granted the Magna Carta ("the Great Charter") on 15 June 1215 after leading Barons had insisted on formal ...
Recapitulation of the Facts of the Korean WarNovember 7, 1950: “Just when there was a lull in the fighting and it looked as if peace were possible, MacArthur staged a gigantic and murderous raid directly across from the Chinese frontier, destroying most of a city in an area where bombings had been forbidden to prevent border violations.” “There were reports,” The New York Times said October 15, that General MacArthur had ordered the first bombings of North Korean cities without authorization from Washington.” “General Stratemeyer, commander of the Far East Air Forces described the attack: ‘when fighter planes swept the ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
