Readers interested in discussions of foreign policy will want to read Norman Podhoretz's lengthy and insightful essay, Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?, published in the September 2006 issue of Commentary magazine.
Podhoretz identifies three original pillars of the Bush Doctrine: (1) the categorical rejection of relativism and the embracing of categories such as good and evil, right and wrong in the context of terrorism; (2) a new conception of terrorism; (3) the determination to take preemptive action against emerging threats. He identifies a further pillar as the President clarified how Israel and the Palestinians fit into the larger war on Islamist terror, and insisted that US support of a Palestinian state would be conditioned on Palestinians renoucing terrorism and embracing democratic reform.
The Bush Doctrine has been attacked and misrpresented ever since its initial articulation. The surpising twist is seen in the number of conservative--even neoconservative--commentators have pronounced the doctrine dead in the water. It is to them that Podhoretz responds, and the result is illuminating and insightful.
Here is his conclusion. (Keep in mind that Podhoretz insists on calling the Cold War "World War III" and the current war on Islamofacism "World War IV.")
"It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.:
