The Rightwing Roots of Bush's Foreign Policy

Polls show that Americans have grown increasingly disillusioned with President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Most people view this as a product of the Bush administration’s hubris or mistakes rather than a failure of its ideology. Yet what is particularly striking is how much the problems in Iraq stem from longstanding conservative and neoconservative policies and strategies. Pre-emptive war, unilateralism, a disregard for international treaties, contorted legal interpretations, and the manipulation of intelligence reports, have characterized not merely President Bush’s efforts, but more than a half century of conservative thinking and leadership.

When President Bush proclaimed his doctrine of pre-emptive war at West Point in June, 2002, commentators described this as a bold departure. But many conservatives had long advocated an aggressive strike-first policy in its foreign affairs pronouncements. As early as 1950, James Burnham, one of the most influential fathers of modern conservatism, advanced a theory of “preventative war,” arguing that in the battle against the Soviet Union, it might be necessary for the United States to launch a war in order to secure peace. The notion remained at the core of conservative thinking as an alternative to Cold War policies of containment and détente. Throughout the lengthy and ominous confrontation with the Soviet Union, “preventative war” inspired relatively few adherents outside of the radical right. President Bush and his neoconservative advisers, however, resurrected it in the aftermath of September 11 and employed it as the primary basis for the Iraq invasion.

Conservatives similarly preached the virtues of unilateralism and aggressive military strength as the keys to foreign policy. This included not only the deep-seated hostility to the United Nations displayed by President Bush in the buildup to the Iraq war, but an imbedded suspicion of all international alliances and treaties. The Bush Administration has balked at enforcing even such basic agreements as the Geneva Conventions that govern the treatment of prisoners of war. The Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, sought and developed questionable legal opinions that would absolve the United States from applying the principles of the pact, leading in no small part to the disgrace at Abu Ghraib.

This legal manipulation to evade international standards also has a clear precedent in conservative thinking. In supporting Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), conservatives bristled under the constraints of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The ABM Treaty specified that “Each party undertakes not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components…that are space-based.” On the eve of the 1985 Geneva Summit, Reagan’s first meeting with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, conservatives suddenly introduced a new “broad interpretation” of the pact. Hardliners in the Reagan administration now claimed that the ABM Treaty, despite its specific language barring space-based applications, left open the possibility of developing systems based on new technologies not in existence in 1972.

This “broad interpretation” constituted not only a rejection of the ABM accord as it had been generally understood for over a decade, but an unprecedented assertion that the executive branch could independently reinterpret any longstanding international agreement. State Department legal adviser Abraham B. Sofaer claimed that an examination of the original ABM negotiation transcripts, which remained classified, supported this conclusion. A congressional investigation of the documents, however, and subsequent testimony by Sofaer himself, revealed that the transcripts in no way endorsed a “broad interpretation.” The entire affair had been a legal subterfuge to evade the ABM Treaty and create a loophole for the development of SDI.

Perhaps most striking are the parallel abuses in intelligence gathering in the 1970s and 1980s and those leading up to the Iraq invasion. The Bush administration, as we now know, ignored intelligence reports that failed to support their contentions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Al Qaeda and seized upon any evidence, no matter how questionable, that supported its position.

In the mid-1970s, neoconservatives united under the banner of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), charged that the CIA had grossly underestimated the Soviet military and nuclear threat. At CPD urging, CIA Director George H.W. Bush created an “independent” Team B, several of whose members belonged to the CPD, to reassess Soviet capabilities.

Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the Soviet Union had achieved military superiority over the United States. Its findings became the basis for the massive Reagan-era defense buildup. When in the mid-1980s the CIA determined that Team B estimates had wildly overstated Soviet defense spending, the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge the more accurate assessments. Similarly, when the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research questioned Soviet involvement in world terrorism, a core conservative belief, administration officials rejected the reports.

The disastrous missteps and deceptions of the George W. Bush foreign policy team thus represent not an aberration, but a continuation of principles and practices inherent among the dominant faction of modern American conservatism. In part this is true because many of the same people—Vice President Richard Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and others—remain at the center of the decision-making process. But given its track record, and the broader foreign policy assumptions of the Republican leadership, the time has come for Americans to question not just the personnel of the current administration, but its bedrock philosophy and values. The debacle in Iraq has laid bare the shortcomings of the conservative worldview. Americans must recognize this if the nation is to reconstruct a viable foreign policy for the post-Iraq era.