THE CONTINUITY OF JACKSONIANISM:

Grand old policy: A scholar argues that Bush's doctrine of preemption has deep roots in American history (Laura Secor, 2/8/2004, Boston Globe)

EVERY PRESIDENT makes foreign policy. Only a select few, over the sweep of history, design what scholars term grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries, of policy.

Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.

Gaddis knows the latter name may bring a number of his colleagues up short. Critics charge that President Bush is a lightweight, Gaddis laments, and they do so because the president is a generalist who prefers the big picture to its details. Over lunch at Mory's, Yale's tweedy private dining club, Gaddis suggests that academics underrate Bush because they overvalue specialized knowledge. In reality, as his new book asserts, after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush underwent "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V."

The Bush doctrine is more serious and sophisticated than its critics acknowledge -- but it is also less novel, Gaddis maintains. Three of its core principles -- preemptive war, unilateralism, and American hegemony -- actually hark back to the early 19th century, to the time of John Quincy Adams.[...]

What is perhaps most important about the Bush doctrine is also very specific to its era, says Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming "Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk": It shifts the geographical center of American strategy.

"The Cold War was fundamentally about Europe," says Mead. "Whatever happened anywhere in the world, the basic question was how it would affect the standoff with the Soviets in Europe. Now the Bush people are saying that whatever happens anywhere in the world, the question is, how will it affect the Middle East and the war on terror?"

In putting so much emphasis on what's old in the Bush doctrine, does Gaddis risk losing sight of what's new? Historical analogies, after all, can obscure as much as they illuminate. So it seems when I ask Gaddis why, if democratization is central to the Bush doctrine, the administration failed to plan for the occupation and transition to democratic sovereignty in Iraq.

That's "not surprising," says Gaddis insouciantly. After all, he notes, the reconstruction efforts in Japan and Germany were badly planned as well.

All the Bush doctrine ultimately does is apply the quintessential American idea--that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"--to all men.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2004 10:37 AM