The Bush Doctrine in Asia: A Brief Introduction

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2003, pp. 5-7. THE BUSH DOCTRINE IN ASIA: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION Peter Van Ness About a year ago, Mel Gurtov asked me if I would like to edit a special issue of Asian Perspective on the Bush Doctrine, and I jumped at the opportunity. Mel and I hoped that we could commission articles that would represent as full a geographical range of Asian opinion as possible, and we were eager to invite specialists from the individual countries in Asia in an attempt to provide in particular analyses of how U.S. policy is perceived and understood on the receiving end. I am personally delighted that so many distinguished colleagues have written articles for us. Although we failed to find the people we wanted to write about South and Central Asia, and we do not have a country study on Japan, all of which are obviously very important, nonetheless I think we have succeeded in presenting here a sig­ nificant representation of thinking in the region. We chose authors, by and large, who we knew to be critical of the Bush administration. It was not our intention to provide a balance here between positive and critical views of the Bush Doctrine. However, we decided at the outset that we would not attempt to impose a particular conceptual perspective on the contributors. Instead, we asked authors to interpret the Bush Doctrine as they understood it, and to analyze its strategic implications for their particular country or issue area in the way that they believed to be most intellectually appropriate. To encourage collaboration among the authors, we orga­ nized a workshop for the contributors in June 2003, in Seoul, at 6 Peter Van Ness the Institute for Far Eastern Studies of Kyungnam University. We are grateful to Dr. Jae Kyu Park, President of Kyungnam University, Dr. B. C. Koh, Director of IFES, Dr. Taik-young Hamm, Co-Editor of Asian Perspective, and their staff for their support and hospitality for the workshop. We asked all contrib­ utors to prepare first drafts for the workshop, whether or not they could attend personally, and we discussed each of those drafts together with several Korean colleagues, including Pro­ fessor Geun Lee, Dr. Sung Han Kim, and Dr. Mikyoung Kim. Thanks to all, we had a lively and productive discussion for two days in Seoul. It is important to analyze the Bush Doctrine, because in less than three years in office, President George W. Bush and his administration have transformed U.S. foreign policy and reshaped global international relations in a profound way. Many American commentators continue to talk about 9-11 as the day the world changed, but increasingly I think analysts around the world have concluded that more important than 9-11 has been the ideas that the Bush leadership brought into office in January 2001. Those ideas, which were reshaped into a "war on terror" after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have most profoundly changed the world. Central components of the doctrine that they have articulated and implemented are: unilateralism, preemptive war, missile defense, new policies for the use of nuclear weapons, and an apparent contempt for inter­ national law, especially for treaties or institutions that might limit or constrain the arbitrary exercise of U.S. power. The leading "hardliners" in the Bush administration (Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and John Bolton) are often called neoconservatives or "neocons"; but in my view, such a label is misleading. It is important to recognize that these men are radicals or even revolutionaries. Usually one would expect to find conservatives as leaders in the most power­ ful country in the world, a leadership determined to protect and sustain the immensely privileged global position enjoyed by the United States. But these men are not conservatives. They are not simply trying to preserve the U.S. role in world affairs; they want to transform it. Some, like Paul Wolfowitz, are visionaries in a 19th-century, imperial mold. Dreaming of bringing "civilization" to the non-Westem world, Wolfowitz is convinced that the Unit- The Bush Doctrine in Asia: A BriefIntroduction 7 ed States can democratize the...