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A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with lecture number eight of American Foreign Policy. Post Cold War Retrench or expand.
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We won. The Soviet Union fell.
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That's right. And when the Soviet Union falls, America is left as the. The one and only superpower in the world and the one that gets to dictate foreign affairs for a long period of time. And it leads to a different kind of involvement of America in the world stage, and one that is in many ways questionable.
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We have some adventures in the Middle East.
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Yeah, that's right. That leads to very long wars in the Middle east. Afghanistan, over 20 years, Iraq. And the purpose stated by the Bush White House was to spread democracy.
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Here we get into a difficulty in modern American political theory. There is a taking of teaching in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and that they're endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and going on to an assumption that that means all people should be governed in the same way. But you have to read more extensively the writings of the Founding to understand what the founders actually believed about how universal rights are protected for peoples. Federalist II is a great example. Americans who have the same natural rights as any other people have a different type of character. They're used to ruling themselves, and they have a type of unity in language and religion and tradition and customs. And even the land John Jay says in Federalist 2 is conducive to a single people. It doesn't mean, though, that you can take the Federalist Papers, translate them into a foreign language, and turn a foreign people into Americans. They have their own language and religion and customs. And while they enjoy the same natural rights, they, their government might need to take different means to protect those rights. A constitutional republic tends not to work in a place like Iraq where people aren't used to that form of government. They have different customs and they have a different way of being. So America ran into some difficulties trying to spread democracy, as it was called, trying to encourage these peoples to have a government that represents the type of government we have in America. And this is because the politicians took the principles of the Founding, but didn't look at the practices and application. And that could be a problem with reading the Declaration, which is the greatest expression of human politics of all time, and trying to apply it without doing due diligence on the circumstances that prudence, as the Declaration says, dictates we look at.
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That's right. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote The Declaration, or the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, said, if you take the people of France and you just uproot them and move them all to America, they don't just suddenly become Americans. There's a certain character for the people, and that applies to all nations. You can't just come and impose certain principles of them and expect them to suddenly follow those principles.
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Professor Anton does a good job of explaining how we attempted to Professor Anton does a good job of explaining how America attempted to export its political ideals and political institutions and forms and the difficulty that we faced in that overseas. Professor Anton continues in his excellent analysis of American foreign policy in an interview he has done with the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour podcast, which you can listen to at podcast hillsdale.edu Again, to listen to Professor Anton's further thoughts on American foreign policy, go to podcast Hillsdale.
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And now let's turn to lecture number eight of American foreign policy, Post Cold War Retrench or Expand.
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So what do we do now? That's really the question that should begin this lecture, because it's the question that was on everyone's mind at the end of the Cold War. I think it's safe to say that to a lot of people, probably including President George H.W. bush himself, the end of the Cold War came as a surprise. That is, very few people thought it would end when it did. Some, as we saw when we talked about detente, believed it might last, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future, for decades, perhaps a century or more. Others, such as Ronald Reagan above all, were more confident that it could be brought to an end sooner, but still probably believed it wouldn't happen. The end wouldn't happen as quickly as it did. Remember what we said about that old document, NSC 68, that very important document which asked the American people to do extraordinary things that they weren't used to doing in peacetime on the grounds that this was an extraordinary time, an extraordinary challenge that required serious departures from historic practice. And the American people accepted that argument and accepted the burden asked of them higher taxes, peacetime conscription, greater involvement in world affairs for foreign aid, a peacetime civilian intelligence service, and all the others that we talked about. But now that the emergency was over, the question of what next loomed very large. It preoccupied foreign policy circles, and we may say that those circles divided into two camps. The first said, well, we went along with all of this because you said there was an emergency and we believed you, but now the emergency is over, so we can change course back to something More like historic American practice. Can't we. Can't we reduce our overseas commitments, reduce spending on the military, maybe curtail some of the extraordinary involvement that we've had with other nations, that is to say, not revert to isolationism necessarily, but do less? After all, if the country is no longer threatened by a superpower bent on world conquest, then it doesn't need to maintain the same size military, the same size forward posture, the same global commitments. It had been more than two millennia since the politics of the world. The geopolitics of the world had basically divided into two superpowers or two poles. A bipolar world. Most people at the time thought that the bipolar world of the USSR versus the United States or the free world versus the communist world was unprecedented. I'm going to throw a bit of a wrench into that argument by saying that I think there is an analogy in the ancient world, and that is the standoff between Rome versus Carthage. But I leave it to you to judge whether I'm right about that. In any event, what's certainly clear after the period 1989 to 1992 is that the world is no longer bipolar. America stands preeminent. But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is by the grace of God, America won the Cold War. In fact, one landmark article from the time in the same prestige journal, Foreign affairs, that published the X article that we talked about by the late Charles Krauthammer. You might know Charles Krauthammer, he's a prolific columnist for the Washington Post and a fixture on Fox News before his death in 2018. Well, Krauthammer, while trained as a medical doctor, was in fact a prolific essayist, especially on foreign affairs, and coined the term the Reagan Doctrine to describe the Reagan administration's policy of supporting armed insurgents against communism. So Charles Krauthammer also famously during this period, wrote an article for Foreign affairs, the same prestige journal that published the X article, and it was called the Unipolar Moment. Well, unipolar, all right. Contrast that with bipolar, by which we're not talking about bipolar disorder, although some of the people who conduct American foreign policy, you might wonder if they're not afflicted with it. Now, this is just another way of using fancy terminology to confuse the layman, the non expert. All unipolar means is that there's only one really super powerful country in the world that dictates the course of world events. So in a bipolar world, you have two, the United States and the USSR In a unipolar world, you have one, the United States. And that article is emblematic of the second camp. The argument of the second camp, which is this unipolar moment has never happened before in world history. And it just so happens that it benefits us, the United States, and we should take advantage of it and preserve this position of global leadership, our position as the preeminent nation of the world, for as long as possible. And these two camps fought it out in journal articles, in op eds, in debates, and also in the halls of policy. Now you have to think way back to the George H.W. bush administration. These were different times and the Republican Party was a different party in those days. It was still very divided. In that administration you had what came to be known as neoconservatives. I'm going to have to talk a little bit more about that phrase in a moment. And more traditional, old fashioned realists, the sort of old fashioned, what would we call them? Country club Republicans, Eastern establishment Republicans. You can picture the type. Think of former Secretary of State James Baker. Very much not a neoconservative, not much of an interventionist, much more of a realist, much more of a restrainer. Those two camps were both present in the Bush administration and neither one had dominance. And they fought it out internally. In 1986, Congress passed the Goldwater Nichols act, which was one of many, but perhaps the most significant amendment to the 1947 National Security act and the 1949 law that created the Department of Defense, which we've already talked about. The Goldwater Nichols Act's primary purpose was to streamline the chain of command structure within the Department of Defense. But I want to talk about a lesser known provision which is a requirement that executive branch that the present administration, whichever it is, submit to Congress in public a document known as the National Security Strategy. Now that's sort of like NSC 68, except that it's a public document from its inception. It's never classified or meant to be. It can be read by all, by the American people, by America's allies, and also by America's adversaries. And in addition to the nss, there are subsidiary strategy documents that are required by Congress. One such document was being worked on in the Pentagon, in an office within the Pentagon with a strong concentration of neoconservatives, that is to say, people who thought the policy of the United States should, should be to seize the unipolar moment, maintain a position of global leadership for as long as possible, global dominance even for as long as possible. When you work On a government document like this, you have to circulate it through to a lot of offices and to a lot of people, which means a lot of people who may not like the way you're framing issues or drawing conclusions have to read it and comment on it. Well, I can give you now a short lesson in how to play the bureaucratic game, Washington style. So imagine yourself sitting at a State Department desk receiving such a document and being alarmed by it and thinking that it amounts to imperial overstretch or some such thing. Well, what would you do? Well, I'll tell you the Washington way. You leak it to the New York Times, of course. That's what you do. And that's exactly what happened with this document. And it caused a gigantic furor. It upset allies, it upset friends, it upset members of Congress. It certainly upset everybody who said the United States needed to retrench and do less now that the emergency was over and the Bush administration repudiated the document and eventually, in its stead, put out a document under the same rubric with much less ambitious goals. But this argument did not go away. In fact, it continued to rage and you could say was only resolved after 9, 11, which I will get to in due course. During this period, it wasn't really clear which side the president, that is, George H.W. bush, took. Sometimes he sounded like he supported the idea of a unipolar moment. Sometimes he sounded like a restrainer. In fact, even in hindsight, I'm not sure he ever really took a side on any of these great questions. A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. But in any event, he used a phrase that came to be defined as emblematic of his administration's foreign policy, that is to say, a New World Order. Does everybody remember him saying that what is at stake is more than one small country? It is a big idea. A New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind. In a sense, that's just a statement of fact. The Cold War order was over because there was no more Cold War and there was no more USSR So by definition, we had a New World Order. The question is what shape that New World Order would take. Now, the defining event of the Bush presidency, whether you want to consider that as a matter of foreign policy, but I would say of all policy, was the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, occasioned by the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, on August 1990, and the subsequent war, an Air war, followed by a very brief ground war in early 1991 that ejected Saddam Hussein's forces from Iraq. And the Bush administration performed spectacularly here. They marshaled an international coalition. They united America's European and Arab allies. They got a resolution out of the United nations authorizing the use of force. The campaign went spectacularly with minimal casualties. Saddam's forces were ejected from Kuwait. That little country directly to his south was liberated. And at the end of it all, the president had an 85% approval rating and appeared to be cruising toward an easy reelection. Now, we know that didn't happen because of economic troubles. The President was defeated in 1992, but that's the way it looked in early 1991. And he made a fateful decision not to continue the war all the way to Baghdad, as some were calling for. I think it's safe to say that the people calling for that were more the people in the unipolar moment camp, the press, your advantage camp, rather than the. Let's go back to a sort of pre Cold War, even Pre World War II, policy of more restraint and non intervention. But the President decided not to do that, and he left Saddam Hussein in power, a decision that again divided foreign policy experts and divided the Republican Party. Now, some of you may be thinking reasonably that we've gotten pretty far into a course on American foreign policy without talking about the Middle East. But this is another one of those issues that could be a course in and of itself. Not just the Middle east, which certainly could be a course in and of itself, but just American policy toward the Middle East. And American foreign policy had been active in, if not preoccupied with, the Middle east before this. I don't want to go into it in great detail because that would take us forever. So I just want to make the following couple of comments. First is the discovery of oil on the western shore of the Persian Gulf in the early 1940s. Maybe some of you have seen that famous photograph of FDR and King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia on an American naval battle cruiser in 1943. From that point onward, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been allies, with ups and downs, to be sure, but basically allies. However, to get that oil out to the rest of the world, it has to pass through a very narrow little passage known as the Strait of Hormuz. That's where a sort of the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula almost touches Iran. And it's so narrow that if a hostile navy wants to block that strait and prevent Gulf oil from being shipped out, it can do so. And so this is the United States number one interest in the Middle east to make sure that oil flows freely, not just for us. For the longest time, in fact, until the early 1970s, the United States remained a net exporter of oil. The second preoccupation, you might say, of U.S. policy in the Middle east is the state of Israel, which came to be in a war of independence in 1947 and 48. Here's another topic that could be a course by itself, not just the history of Israel, but merely United States policy toward Israel. The United States took a hands off approach for most of Israel's early history. As Israel struggled to maintain its independence, it got directly involved in the 1973 Yom Kippur War when the Nixon administration authorized military aid to Israel, which was then being invaded by a number of Arab armies. Arab anger at that support led directly to an oil embargo that caused, among other things, the imposition of a national 55 mile per hour speed limit and also for a time, gas lines. That is to say, you could only buy gas in certain places on certain days, and sometimes cars lined up at gas stations were many blocks long. There was so little gasoline available in this country. The core issue here, if I can try to make it as simple as possible, is that the land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, more or less down to but not including the Sinai Peninsula, and up to but not including obviously to the north, Lebanon and Syria, is the home of a sovereign Israeli state recognized by the United States, but also of two large areas, the west bank and the Gaza Strip, with a majority population of Palestinian Arabs and which are not states. Pretty much every administration from the Nixon administration on, has directly involved American diplomacy to get a resolution of this issue. Fifty years later, there still is no resolution to this issue. But American diplomats really have never given up. Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues each week Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale edu, or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio. Hillsdale College is a small Christian classical liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding, and we want you or your son or daughter to apply. At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and mind by studying timeless truths in a supportive community dedicated to the highest things. Hillsdale College costs significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value, and nearly all students receive financial aid. Our robust core curriculum, vibrant student life, and 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio make for an education like no other. For more information or to fill out an application, visit hillsdale. Edu info. That's hillsdale.edu info. Another effort far more successful of American diplomacy throughout this period has been to make peace between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, which at the birth of the State of Israel were all hostile to Israel and even fought many wars against Israel. The first great peace treaty was signed in the Carter administration, the Camp David Accords. The famous Camp David Accords in which Menachem Begin, prime Minister of Israel, shook hands with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, the largest by population and militarily most powerful Arab state, and from that point on followed peace treaties, eventually with Jordan and in the Trump administration with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and other states as well. The dream of US Diplomacy would be a peace treaty between Israel and every Arab state, complete peace in the region, and some resolution of the Israeli Palestinian question on terms favorable and acceptable to both sides. As I said, that's a 50 year dream for us diplomacy hasn't been achieved yet. I don't know when or if it will be achieved. But it's something to think about when you think about American foreign policy because it remains a major preoccupation of American foreign policy no matter what administration is in power. Bill Clinton ran against George Bush in 1992 mostly on economic issues. To the extent that he talked about foreign policy, he mostly sounded like one of the restrainers, the non interventionists. In fact, he used a phrase that was popular with certain parts of the American public, the peace dividend. That is to say, now that the Cold War is over, we can spend a lot less on defense and on foreign policy and on foreign affairs generally, and invest that money in domestic programs.
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The spending cuts I recommend were carefully thought through in a way to minimize any adverse economic impact, to capture the peace dividend for investment purposes, and to switch the balance in the budget from consumption to more investment.
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So it's safe to say that if you voted for Clinton on foreign policy grounds, what you thought you were getting was someone who was going to focus on domestic affairs and do a lot less overseas. Well, it didn't exactly turn out that way. Before the end of the Bush administration, the President embarked on a humanitarian intervention in Somalia, a country in Far East Africa, in what's known as the Horn of Africa, that part of Africa that sort of sticks out underneath the Arabian Peninsula. Somalia was a classic case of a failed state. That is to say, its government didn't work. It was controlled by warlords. There was a famine. The United nations ordered food aid, but the food aid was being stolen at the docks by the warlords. And so the President ordered American troops to go in and ensure the fair and equitable distribution of food to the people who needed it. This brings up another question that's loomed large for American foreign policy ever since. To what extent do America's moral obligations require humanitarian interventions? It's hard to say, for instance, that the intervention in Somalia, or interventions that would come later, were fulfilling any kind of notion of universal rights or, that is to say, of political legitimacy as understood by the founders. It's not as if there had been a revolution in Somalia in the name of equal natural rights and government by consent. There was all agreed, basically no government in Somalia. But people were hurting and people were starving. And the United States was a great power, a wealthy power with a capable military. It had the capability to intervene and do something. So the argument went. And. And aren't you failing some kind of moral obligation if you have the capability and you don't use it? Well, some in the Bush administration felt that way, and they persuaded the President to back this intervention. Clinton didn't initiate the Somalia intervention, but he did inherit it, and he expanded it. And he was president during a famous incident known as Black Hawk down, in which a small number of American troops found themselves surrounded by in the middle of Mogadishu and had to fight their way out. During the course of the rest of his administration, the United States also intervened in Haiti, in Bosnia, and in Kosovo. Clinton also was saddled with the ongoing problem of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As part of the resolution of the 91 Gulf War, all kinds of restrictions were put on Saddam Hussein, most of which he attempted to find a way to get around. The United States was the lead power in enforcing a so called no fly zone, an area in which Iraqi jets were not allowed to fly. And that meant that US Pilots had to shoot down Iraqi planes. So we were still using force, albeit not nearly on the scale of the 91 Gulf War in Iraq throughout this decade. But the most consequential aspect of the 1990s, in hindsight for foreign policy, turns out to have been terrorism. Now, terrorism is not a new tactic. You could say that it's as old as the hills. If you want to try to find dates for the beginning of modern terrorism, well, maybe it's all of the airplane hijackings that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those of you old enough may remember a time when you didn't have to walk through a metal detector to get on a plane. Well, you can thank those hijackers of the late 60s and early 70s for that. Terrorism has come to be associated with the Middle east, although it's a tactic that spans the continents and various different causes. The largest terrorist blow ever struck against the United States before 911 was a truck bomb against a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that killed more than 240American Marines. In the 1990s, terrorists got extremely active. They famously bombed the World Trade center for the first time in 1993. They bombed a barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 called the Khobar Towers, where many Americans were asleep at the time. They bombed two United States embassies simultaneously on the same day in Tanzania and Kenya in Africa. And they bombed an American destroyer, a Navy ship, in the Gulf of Aden, off of Yemen in the Arabian Sea in 2000. All of this was being directed by, at least partially supported by a group known to American intelligence officials, but not to many others. Most of the American people had never heard this term at the time called Al Qaeda, led by a figure named Osama bin Laden. And the Clinton administration was very active in tracking bin Laden, pursuing bin Laden, trying to find a way to neutralize his network and even take him out one way or another.
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Our target was terror. Our mission was clear, to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.
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Now, it later emerged that, in fact, the Clinton administration had more than one plausible chance to strike bin Laden and didn't take them. These remain controversial topics. Those in the Clinton administration will heatedly deny that they missed any opportunities. And critics of the Clinton administration will. Will accuse that administration of hesitation and worse. We don't need to go into any of that right now. Clinton was, of course, replaced by George W. Bush, the son of the former president, in a very tight election against Clinton's own Vice President, Al Gore. George W. Bush, much like Clinton in 1992, ran on what seemed like a kind of restraint platform. He called it a humble foreign policy. He criticized, quote, unquote, nation building. That is the Clinton administration's policy of using the U.S. military to intervene in places and then stick around as a kind of constabulary force while aid organizations, social workers and NGOs, that's just a fancy foreign policy term for non governmental organizations, tried to build up institutions in civil society. George W. Bush said he thought that this was a bad use of the American military, of American military personnel, and of American money, and campaigned against it. And for the first 2/3 of a year, I guess we should say, of his administration, it seemed like he would keep that promise. But then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Perhaps the most important consequence from the perspective of American foreign policy and its future was that it settled the debate between the restrainers or the non interventionists and the unipolar moment crowd. That is to say, those who wanted the United States to retrench and do less versus those who thought the United States should take advantage of the moment, stretch its wings or keep them stretched and try to maintain its dominant position. Now, when I say settled that debate, I don't necessarily mean on the merits. That is to say, I'm not saying that it proved the illegitimacy of the retrenchment side of the argument. I just mean in practice the debate was settled, the policy became much more interventionist, and in fact, the George W. Bush administration, which ran on a restrained, humble foreign policy, became unrestrained, if not entirely unrestrained, much less restrained than you would have predicted had you read the campaign rhetoric. And it had the same effect on the Democratic Party to the extent that when you finally get an Obama administration eight years later, he too campaigned in ways highly critical of Bush administration overreach. And yet his policy ended up differing much less than the Bush policy than you might think based on what he said. That is, Obama said as a candidate in 2008, the first order of business after 911 was obviously to find and punish those who did it. And that included fundamentally two groups. First and foremost, as many Al Qaeda operatives as could be found up to and including its senior leadership. But also the Taliban, a regime that was ruling Afghanistan, the country from which Al Qaeda planned and executed much of the 911 attacks. I mean, this was a global conspiracy. Let's be clear. There were elements of it taking place all over Europe and the United States in the many years it took to plan and execute the attack. But Afghanistan was the home base. And so the United States, with a very, very small Force invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 and quickly routed the Taliban, but unfortunately was not able to capture Al Qaeda's most senior leadership. As you all may remember, Osama Bin Laden remained in hiding for another 10 years until he was tracked down by US intelligence and killed by Navy Seals in Pakistan in May of 2011. The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children. His number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, who took over for him, was only tracked down by U.S. intelligence and killed in Afghanistan in 2022.
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On Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan that killed the Emir of Al Qaeda, Iman Al Zawiri.
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The Bush administration called this broad effort the war on terror or the war on terrorism. Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. Now, the question that arose for the Bush administration was what does fighting a war on terror really mean? And to oversimplify, but I hope in a way that isn't misleading, the two possible approaches were focus very narrowly and strictly on terrorists, terror networks. Find them, kill them when you can, or have to cut off their funding, capture as many as possible, interrogate, use intelligence to track down networks and to thwart plots, etc. And put pressure on regimes that harbor terrorists, that is to say, diplomatic and economic pressure to coerce or persuade regimes not to support terrorism, even in an indirect way, and military pressure if necessary. If regimes can't be talked out of supporting terrorists, we may call that, for lack of a better term, the minimalist approach. It's not doing nothing. I don't mean to disparage it, but it's sticking to a narrow definition of the problem and going after that. On the other side, you had the more maximalist approach. These people argued, look, call it a war on terror, that's kind of a misnomer. Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a war on terror. That's like saying the Americans war against Japan in the Pacific is a war on the bombing of naval bases. No, it's a war on a nation making war on you. So we have to identify the source of this problem and address it. And ultimately, where this argument led was the source of the problem is discontent amongst the millions of people in the Arab world and billions of Muslims worldwide. And that discontent stems from bad government. It stems from undemocratic governments that enrich the people at the top and mistreat their citizens. And until and unless we can address that, we'll never solve this problem. And we'll be fighting terrorism as a tactic and terrorists as real entities for decades or longer. We have to go to the heart of the matter. This argument went. Another word or phrase for this argument or line of policy was the so called democracy agenda. I think everyone watching this probably has some idea of what I'm talking about. So I already mentioned the United States invaded Afghanistan and quickly overthrew its Taliban government in late 2001 and early 2002. As you also know, the United States then spent the next 20 years with a military presence in Afghanistan trying to establish a functioning democratic, small l liberal government because it thought that that was the only way to address the deep wells of resentment and anger that lead to terrorism. And that same impulse or belief motivated in part the war in Iraq, the attempt to establish Iraqi democracy, and later the Obama administration's support for the so called Arab Spring. Now, I want to talk about the so called Bush Doctrine. Well, one aspect of the Bush Doctrine we've talked about and that is the democracy agenda. And you can see it most clearly in President Bush's second inaugural address in which he says, the goal of American policy will be the ending of tyranny in our world. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. Now, if we want to go back to the beginning, what the American founders would say, first they would say, that's absolutely none of our business. But second, they would say, you're crazy. That's impossible. Even the most powerful nation cannot end tyranny in our world. That's like saying, you're going to end death or end sickness or end suffering. That's possible only in heaven, not in this world. Now, the other meaning of the Bush Doctrine is, if anything, even more controversial. For centuries, if not longer, philosophers, theorists and practitioners of international relations have recognized that a nation doesn't have to wait. It's not obligated to wait for an attack. That is to say, if a nation can see clearly that another nation is mobilizing to attack it, it is morally permissible and even justifiable and necessary to fire the first shot. The Bush administration, after the success, the initial success of ousting the Taliban, began to look around the Middle east at various hostile regimes. And it focused its eyes on Iraq for one reason. Because everyone knew Saddam Hussein was a terrible person, an Evil tyrant who mistreated his own people, who had used chemical weapons against his own people, who invaded other countries and had connections, however tenuous, but connections to terrorist networks. In their view, the Bush administration said, this regime is a danger. It's already invaded another country. It was forcibly ejected from that country and is subject to a number of, at the time, 15 UN resolutions that it doesn't often comply with. So it's in continuous violation of international law, international norms. It's not going to get its act together. And we now know this is the Bush administration's argument. In any event, we now know what the dangers from terrorism really are. Remember, the United states lost almost 3,000 people on 9 11. So essentially what they did is they stretched this notion of preemption to cover a regime that I think everyone had to recognize was not at that moment mobilizing to attack the United States. But the argument went that that old understanding of preemption, of visibly mobilizing armies doesn't hold in the post 911 world, doesn't hold in a world of stealthy terrorist networks, which can completely surprise you, and especially when the potential exists to commit terrorist acts with weapons of mass destruction, by which they meant chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. Classical international relations theory distinguishes preemption from preventive war. A preventive war is a war in which one state, let's say Gilder, says, well, Florin can't threaten me now, but if I wait 10 years, Florin will be so strong that I might not be able to deal with it, so I better start the war now. International relations theorists, moralists, moral philosophers, let us say, have always condemned preventive war even as they allow preemptive war. My argument is that what the Bush administration did was blur the difference between prevention and preemption. They called something that was more akin to prevention. They called it preemption to make it acceptable to global public opinion and to argue that it was enshrined in international law. Now, it may seem that this prevention preemption argument over here and the democracy agenda over here don't have much in common. But if you think about it, there is a link, and that is that by transforming hostile regimes into liberal democracies is the ultimate act of preemption. You are preventing future war by draining the bitterness and the causes of resentment and anger out of the Middle East. And the only way you could do that was through another phrase that was much talked about at the time, through regime change. Right? The regimes are evil, the people are good. And that, in a nutshell, is the philosophy that underlay the Bush administration's foreign policy and got us involved into two very long wars in the Middle east, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in hindsight cost a lot of money. And I think we have to conclude, however reluctantly and sadly, did not accomplish what what the authors of those policies intended or said they would accomplish. Now, as I said and we'll explore in the next lecture, Just like candidate George W. Bush, Candidate Barack Obama sounded a lot different than the incumbent administration and its standard bearer, John McCain, who got the Republican nomination in 2008. And despite a bitter primary fight against George W. Bush in 2000, which, if you recall any of that, you might have thought that they were going to be enemies forever. John McCain sounded just like even more so than George W. Bush as he ran for president in 2008, and Barack Obama, ironically, sounded more like the George W. Bush of 2000. But as we'll see in the next lecture, the actual policy of the Obama administration had more in common with the Bush policy than either President Obama or his Cabinet and senior advisors would care to admit.
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