[1919] in peace2
Bush Vows to Keep Armed Supremacy
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix F AuYeung)
Sat Sep 21 17:09:50 2002
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2002 17:07:01 -0400
From: Felix F AuYeung <ffa1+@pitt.edu>
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Bush vows to keep armed supremacy
David E. Sanger
The New York Times
Saturday, September 21, 2002
http://iht.com/articles/71395.html
Declaration of strategy also promises 'distinctly American internationalism'
WASHINGTON The Bush administration on Friday published its first
comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward
preemptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing
weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document states, for the first
time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be
challenged the way it was during the Cold War.
.
In the 33-page document, President George W. Bush also sought to answer
critics of growing American muscle-flexing by insisting that the United
States would use its military and economic power to encourage "free and
open societies," rather than seek "unilateral advantage." The document
called this "a distinctly American internationalism."
.
The document, titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States,"
is one that every president is required to submit to Congress. It is the
first comprehensive explanation of the Bush administration's foreign
policy, from defense strategy to global warming. A copy of the final draft
was obtained by The New York Times, and the document was published Friday.
.
It sketches out a far more muscular and sometimes aggressive approach to
national security than any since the Reagan era. It includes the
discounting of most nonproliferation treaties in favor of a doctrine of
"counterproliferation," a reference to everything from missile defense to
forcibly dismantling weapons or their components.
.
It declares that the strategies of containment and deterrence - staples of
American policy since the 1940s - are all but dead. There is no way in this
changed world, the document states, to deter those who "hate the United
States and everything for which it stands."
.
"America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing
ones," the document says, sounding what amounts to a death knell for many
of the key strategies of the Cold War.
.
One of the most striking elements of the new strategy document is its
insistence that "the president has no intention of allowing any foreign
power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the
fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago."
.
"Our forces will be strong enough," Bush's document states, "to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of
surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
.
With Russia so financially hobbled that it can no longer come close to
matching U.S. military spending, the doctrine seems aimed at rising powers
like China, which is expanding its conventional and nuclear forces.
.
Much of the document focuses on how public diplomacy, the use of foreign
aid and changes in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can
be used to win what it describes as a battle of competing values and ideas,
including "a battle for the future of the Muslim world."
.
The president put the final touches on the new strategy last weekend at
Camp David, Maryland, after working on it for months with his national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and other members of the national
security team. In its military hawkishness, its expressions of concern that
Russian reforms could be undermined by that country's elite and its focus
on bolstering foreign aid, especially for literacy training and AIDS, it
particularly bears the stamp of Rice's thinking.
.
A senior White House official said that Bush had edited the document
heavily "because he thought there were sections where we sounded
overbearing or arrogant." But at the same time, the official said, it is
important to foreclose the option that other countries could aspire to
challenge the United States militarily, because "once you cut off the
challenge of military competition, you open up the possibility of
cooperation in a number of other areas."
.
Still, the administration's critics at home and abroad will almost
certainly find ammunition in the document for their argument that Bush is
only interested in a multilateral approach as long as it does not frustrate
his will. At several points, the document states clearly that when
important American interests are at stake there will be no compromise.
.
The document states that while the United States will seek allies in the
battle against terrorism, "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary,
to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively." That
includes "convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign
responsibilities" not to aid terrorists, the essence of the doctrine Bush
declared on the night of Sept. 11, 2001.
.
The new strategy departs significantly from the last one published by
President Bill Clinton, at the end of 1999. Clinton's strategy dealt at
length with tactics to prevent the kind of financial meltdowns that
threatened economies in Asia and Russia.
.
The Bush strategy urges other countries to adopt Bush's own economic
philosophy, starting with low marginal tax rates. While Clinton's strategy
relied heavily on enforcing or amending a series of international treaties,
from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to the Comprehensive Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty to Kyoto protocols on the environment, Bush's strategy
dismisses most of those efforts. In fact, the new document celebrates his
decision last year to abandon the ABM Treaty because it impeded American
efforts to build a missile defense system.
.
It recites the dangers of nonproliferation agreements that have failed to
prevent Iran, North Korea, Iraq and other countries from obtaining weapons
of mass destruction, and says that the United States will never subject its
citizens to the newly created International Criminal Court, "whose
jurisdiction does not extend to Americans."
