Transcript
IVO DAALDER: Who knows what the Bush Doctrine is? It’s not a trick question. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, writing in the American Interest I guess one issue ago, suggested that it is not the doctrine of preemption that Governor Palin might have missed, misunderstood, when Charlie Gibson asked about this in an interview a couple of weeks ago, but that it was in fact this statement in Bush’s second inaugural that “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.”
Gaddis suggests that future historians may well refer to this statement as the Bush Doctrine in the same way that people remember the Truman Doctrine and the Monroe Doctrine, unlike say the non-remembered Nixon Doctrine and Carter Doctrine or Reagan Doctrine. But that this statement might well for future historians be as significant as the scripter of what American foreign policy is or could be about as the Truman and Monroe Doctrines were. Unfortunately for Gaddis -- and his arguments -- sorry, the argument that Gaddis had for why this was so was and would be so if the emphasis was on the second part of the statement rather than the first part, on the “ending tyranny” part of the statement as opposed to the statement that argued that it should be “U.S. policy to support the growth” and in fact “to promote the growth of democratic institutions and movements around the world.” He makes a distinction in his article between democracy promotion and the ending of tyranny, suggesting that the ending of tyranny is what may well be remembered as the Bush Doctrine rather than the promotion of democracy.
Unfortunately, Gaddis, who actually suggested the “ending tyranny” language to the Bush speechwriters prior to the second inaugural, the last four years have been more about an exercise in failed democracy promotion rather than a successful attempt to end tyranny. And the question is is whether we’re going to see in the next -- whether that record of the last four years is going to be the record or the likelihood about policy in the future. And that indeed is the question before us. Will in the next four years, in the next eight years, in the next twenty years, in the next fifty years, will the United States have a policy of promoting democracy? Will it have a policy of ending tyranny? Or will it have a policy of trying to do both?
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