“Present at the Destruction”?
George Bush, the Neocons and the Traditions of U.S. Foreign Policy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8836Keywords:
Republican administration, destruction, U.S. foreign policy, George BushAbstract
The article analyses from an historical perspective the foreign policy of the current Republican administration. Contrary to common wisdom, it maintains that the approach to international politics of George W. Bush Jr. does not fundamentally depart from the most venerable diplomatic traditions of the United States. It argues that it is possible to find a cultural, political, ideological, and even religious, lineage to Bush's unilateralism, as it was most famously expressed in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS). What really characterizes current U.S. foreign policy is the attempt to recompose and synthesize different traditions and approaches. This attempted synthesis, however, has produced a confused and ultimately incoherent policy, whose limits and inconsistencies are quintessentially epitomized by a phrase that recurs five times in the 2002 NSS: the need for America to create "a balance of power that favors human freedom."
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.