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, Iran and North Korea. This doctrine was justified by referring to a new age of catastrophic terrorism; it was also framed 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 freer, 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.
