Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change

TLDR: The first "person" in the new Bush "trinitarian" doctrine is military predominance, or, if you like, dominance as mentioned in this paper, which stresses American military dominance, military preemption, and political transformation, and it represents the practical (not necessarily successful) integration of international relations with non-Western political development in the form of an American foreign policy based on the ideological concept and political-military pursuit of democratic regime change.

Abstract: THROUGHOUT THE 1990S, THE 1990S, intellectuals and journalists, partly in response to the proliferation of prefixes -- post-Cold War, post-communist, even postmodern -- engaged in a competitive and seemingly imperative quest to name an era. The results of this effort at authoritative naming were phrases like the "end of history," the "clash of civilizations," an "age of anarchy," and, of course, "globalization" -- none of which, to the authors' undoubted frustration, swept the field. I saw the 1990S as a "Genesis age," a period of history when the world was not biblically "void" but was most assuredly beginning to see its "form," i.e. its shaping institutions (the nuclear family, nuclear deterrence, the nation-state), begin to lose their unchallenged status. Lacking the parsimonious elegance and dogmatism of many others, I also saw the 905 as a "Toga period," a decade when the world responded to the unique reality of American global dominance by imitating - not assimilating -- everything from legislative demo cracy to golf (the American "toga"). (1) With al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. in September 2001, the competitive scholastic exercise over naming was replaced by a more momentous political effort by the Bush administration to identify the threatening, and to author the defining, features of our age. The result is novel to the point of being radical and, unlike academic exercises, consequential. According to the administration, the essential element of our era is the threat emanating from a combination of tyrannical states and what I have called "movements of rage," a malignant political coalition that relentlessly pursues and may succeed in possessing and using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the United States and its allies. (2) The Bush national security doctrine is a response to the likely proliferation of horrendous "wildcat violence" when state disintegration and/or the covert actions of tyrannical regimes offer movements of rage access to insidious weapons whose advanced technology demands only global reach, not global power. Largely in response to this possibility, the Bush doctrine stresses American military predominance, military preemption, and political transformation. From an historical point of view, these are extraordinary ambitions. More, they represent the practical (not necessarily successful) integration of international relations with non-Western political development in the form of an American foreign policy based on the ideological concept, and political-military pursuit, of democratic regime change. Dominance THE FIRST "PERSON" in the new Bush "trinitarian" doctrine is military predominance -- or, if you like, dominance. In the administration's words, "our [military] forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States." (3) This tenet has no immediate bearing on the international issues facing the United States because it will most likely take at least a decade for any imaginable nation to be taken seriously as a military competitor (unless, of course, Japan undergoes radical regime change on its own nationalistic terms). But if the administration is looking at the long term, so will I. Suppose, for example, the European Union becomes a stable, effective, legitimate political entity in world affairs. As such, its expanding population would be greater than ours, its economic power nearly equal, and its military potential the same. Is it at all reasonable to assume that the United States would politically veto, economically prevent, or militarily challenge the further and future integration and military development of a Western, democratic, capitalist Europe? Or, if an economically successful China and an increasingly stable Russia form a political-military alliance, would the United States attack these two nuclear powers to prevent them from "equaling" the United States? …