The Bush Doctrine and Asian Regional Order: The Perils and Pitfalls of Preemption

This article offers a critical perspective on the Bush Doctrine’s impact on the Asian, especially Southeast Asian, security order. It proceeds in four parts. The first examines the problematic nature of the Bush Doctrine, such as its deliberate conflation of preemptive and preventive war and its expansive scope as a “grand strategy of transformation.” This is followed by an analysis of the responses of Southeast Asian states to the doctrine. The third part looks at the “imitation” effects of the Bush Doctrine in Asia-Pacific, where it may be reshaping national security strategies of some states such as Australia and Japan. The last part of the paper evaluates how the Bush Doctrine, with its underlying basis in U.S. power dominance in a unipolar global setting, affects the Asian security architecture, particularly the balance between bilateral and multilateral security approaches to regional order.