The “Bush doctrine”, as elaborated by in President George W. Bush in earlier speeches at West Point and the American Enterprise Institute AEI speeches, as well as as well as in the National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS) of in September 2002, was a logical and well thought-out response to the terrorist threat that presented itself in the wake of September 11, 2001. A high-ranking senior Clinton administration official member of the Clinton administration once confided privately that in their eight years, the Clintonites never managed to produce a strategy of comparable sophistication. Nonetheless, in Mr Bush’s second term, its major key components lie in shambles. The doctrine and it is unlikely to have a a lasting impact on American US foreign policy in future administrations, Republican or Democrat.

The first aspect of the “doctrine” concerned the pre-emptive use of force. The NSS argued quite cogently that in the face of suicide terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction, deterrence and containment – the centrepieces of cold war strategy – would not work and that the United States US needed, as the president has repeatedly stated, to fight them “over there” rather than waiting for them to attack the American homeland.