Geopolitics, Grand Strategy and the Bush Doctrine

As it turned out these people were once again in power on September 11th and the resulting "Bush doctrine", clearly outlined in the 2002 National Security Doctrine of the United States of America, bears many of the hallmarks of the antecedent documents both in the first Bush administration and in the writings emanating from various lobby groups and think tanks during the Clinton presidency.4 AFTER. [...] The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. [...] The ethnocentrism and the focus on states perpetuates a much earlier understanding of international politics that, for all the talk of globalization in the 1990s, persisted in the halls of power, and was the discursive repertoire available on September 11th. [...] The invocation of the term global as the premise for the war on terror immediately confused matters in terms of the specific geographies of danger, but made sense in the terms of the PNAC formulation of America as the pre-eminent global power. [...] While the temptation for further action in the Middle East may be considerable through the third Bush administration, there is a contradiction at the heart of the American efforts related to the innovations in the military capabilities trumpeted in the so-called ‘revolution in military affairs’ - the persistent argument in the American military that it is not in the nation-building business, and G.