Bush Doctrine

National strategy proposed and adopted by U.S. President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

The main principle of the Bush Doctrine is the use of preventive military force against new threats of terrorism and rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Doctrine also includes the principle of unilateralism, or the willingness to act alone if necessary, and a strong belief that the U.S. strategy of opening societies to democracy will bring peace and stability throughout the world.

President Bush initially formulated some key concepts of his doctrine in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when he declared that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. On September 20, 2001, in a televised address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush summed up this principle stating that “every nation, in [Page 98]every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” As a consequence, in October 2001, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban regime, which had failed to hand over Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, who was suspected of being behind the September 11 terrorist attacks.

President Bush reiterated some of the principles of his doctrine during the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism on November 6, 2001; in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002; and in his remarks before the students of the Virginia Military Institute on April 17. On June 1, in front of the 2002 graduation class of the U.S. Military Academy of West Point, President Bush again proposed his doctrine, which later was fully articulated in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) policy document issued in September 2002.

The Threats

The rationale of the Bush Doctrine rests on a threat that, according to President Bush, “lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” by which he meant political and religious extremism coupled with the relative availability of weapons of mass destruction. “The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations.”

According to this doctrine, there are three main sources of threat: terrorist organizations with global reach, weak states that harbor and assist such terrorist organizations, and rogue states that do not abide by internationally accepted norms. Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan under the Taliban represent the first two types of threats. The final type, rogue states, are defined in the NSS as states that “brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers; display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party; are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes; sponsor terrorism around the globe; and reject human values and hate the United States and everything it stands for.”

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