The pre-emptive strike

To its critics, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive antiterrorism seemsunprecedented and dangerous. But to historian John Lewis Gaddis, George W. Bush’s strategy is intellectually sophisticated, serious of purpose and in keeping with established American foreign policy traditions.

That Mr. Gaddis — who many consider the dean of diplomatic historians — makes this case is significant: He is not known to hold briefs for any president, much less Mr. Bush.

Thus his new volume, “Surprise, Security and the American Experience,” seems destined to become the academic touchstone for hawks seeking to buttress political argument with scholarly authority. Luckily for them, the book is engaging, lucidly written and possesses a historical footing as firm as any short, politically provocative work of the last several years.

Mr. Gaddis shows that in times of surprise attack, Americanleadershave learned a rule their counterparts elsewhere haven’t: “For the United States, safety comes from enlarging, rather than contracting, its sphere of responsibilities.”

Mr. Gaddis not only reminds us that American leaders acted upon this idea after every surprise attack, but that the three primary elements of the Bush doctrine — preemption, unilateralism and American hegemony — were to varying extents the same recourses earlier leaders turned to in times of crisis.

The first unexpected attack on American soil, barely remembered today, prompted territorial expansions that yielded America’s favorable geopolitical circumstances. In 1814, a British army marched on Washington, burnt the Capitol and the White House — and changed the American posture from defense to offense.

After this episode Americans would seek to thwart European power projection in the Western Hemisphere. If necessary, they would seize territory unilaterally from weak and vulnerable neighbors.

Pre-emption, too, first emerged after Washington’s burning. The “weak states” argument originated here, and John Quincy Adams was the exponent behind it.

Adams articulated an early doctrine of pre-emption that helped the United States keep European powers at bay, wrest Florida from an enfeebled Spain and lay the foundations for American hegemony.

Adams’ doctrine, Mr. Gaddis shows, begot later rationales for seizing Texas, California and everything in between. Adams foreshadowed foreign policy activists like James Polk, Teddy Roosevelt and others, and even Woodrow Wilson’s globalism in some respects, Mr. Gaddis argues.

The second surprise attack, Pearl Harbor, would precipitate even more expansive thinking. Whereas previous generations sought American pre-eminence at home and near to it, FDR and Harry Truman aimed globally. They anchored American postwar influence in defeated Japan, Germany, and elsewhere in the European mainland and the Pacific Rim.

Where they departed from Adams was to eschew unilateralism in favor of multilateral commitments like NATO, the United Nations and international economic institutions. Pre-emption, too, was out: Mutually assured destruction with the Soviet Union was the rule, as John F. Kennedy’s cautious posture during the Cuban missile crisis showed.

For these reasons, Mr. Gaddis admits, Cold War America was the low ebb of Adams-style policy. He attributes this mostly to the triumph of idealism and the consensus imperative in American foreign policy, but it seems the long reach of America’s new activism was the real reason FDR employed such tactics.

Then came the September 11 attacks. Mr. Gaddis sees President Bush’s post-September 11 move to place Middle East democratization at the center of his national security strategy as the logical culmination of the contributions of both Adams and FDR.

The Bush doctrine is less unilateralist, less pre-emptive than its critics contend, Mr. Gaddis argues, even as it uses both tactics in ways Adams would appreciate. Mr. Bush seems to be more Adams than FDR, however, which Mr. Gaddis takes pains to underscore. “We cannot let our enemies strike first,” he approvingly quotes Mr. Bush’s key strategy document.

Where Mr. Gaddis takes issue with the Bush doctrine has more to do with implementation than first principles. For the author the best strategy combines “unchallengable strengths with universal principles” and is leavened by a sense that worse things than American hegemony exist.

In this latter battle of ideas and perceptions, Mr. Bush appears to be coming up short. The Iraq war “left a growing sense throughout much of the world that there could be nothing worse than American hegemony,” Mr. Gaddis writes.

What to do about such perceptions? “Know when to stop shocking and awing,” Mr. Gaddis argues. Know when pre-emption’s deterrent effects are maximized and when to temper unilateral moves with cooperation. Don’t overdo it.

That’s welcome advice for hawks,would-behegemonists and others who wish Mr. Bush’s ambitious project success.

Brendan Conway is managing editor of the Public Interest.