The End of the Bush Revolution
![handle is hein.journals/fora85 and id is 657 raw text is: The End of
the Bush Revolution
Philip H. Gordon
A RETURN TO REALISM
READING OVER President George W. Bush's March 2006 National
Security Strategy, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence
that the president has backed away from what has become known
as the Bush doctrine. America is at war, says the document; we will
fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in
our country and support democratic movements and institutions
in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending
tyranny in our world.
Talk to any senior administration official, and he or she will tell
you that the president is as committed as ever to the revolutionary
foreign policy principles he spelled out after 9/11: the United States
is fighting a war on terror and must remain on the offensive and ready
to act alone, U.S. power is the foundation of global order, and the
spread of democracy and freedom is the key to a safer and more
peaceful world. Bush reiterated such thinking in his 2006 State of
the Union address, insisting that the United States will act boldly
in freedom's cause and never surrender to evil.
But if the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution
itself is over. The question is not whether the president and most
of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine-they
do-but whether they can sustain it. They cannot. Although the
PHILIP H. GORDON is a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the
Brookings Institution and a co-author, with Jeremy Shapiro, of Allies at
War:America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq.
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The End of the Bush Revolution
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