In Defense of the Bush Doctrine by Robert
G. Kaufman (Lexington: The University
Press of Kentucky, 2007). 251 pp.

TED. V. MCALLISTER is Edward L. Gaylord Chair
and Associate Professor of Public Policy at the
Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and
author of Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric
Voegelin, and the Search for a Post Liberal Order.

Some books are of the moment, slamming
their bows straight on into contemporary
political storms. Robert Kaufman’s
In Defense of the Bush Doctrine is one such
book. Some book reviews are of the moment
too, written during the maelstrom in hopes of
discerning which way the wind is blowing.
This is not such a review. By the time this
review enters the conversation the book will
be many months old and circumstances will
have changed. But Kaufman’s argument
raises many broader and deeper matters than
does the present conflict in Iraq or even the
“global war on terror.” This is a book that
presumes rather than proves, and what it
presumes goes to the center of the intellectual
divide separating conservatives and
neoconservatives. Kaufman, a self-proclaimed
neoconservative, understands the world and
its machinations in light of a very simple
theoretical perspective and an even simpler
moral casuistry. In his book one finds a
number of historical “lessons” but nothing
approaching historical understanding. All
serious arguments in this book are deductive,
despite the many historical references.

Kaufman’s theoretical framework he calls
“Moral Democratic Realism.” Such a view
balances the pessimism of a “Judeo-Christian”
conception of humans as suffering from
“irredeemable human imperfection” with a
wild optimism about human freedom and the
power of the American hegemon to bring
about a much greater measure of global
democracy, freedom, and capitalism.
Kaufman’s view of human nature
leads him to emphasize the
necessity of power relations and
of the ready use of force to
check evil. Because evil is always
with us, good people must
be ever vigilant against the
newest manifestations of evil
and they must be willing to use
force in this ongoing Manichean
struggle.

The “realism” in Moral
Democratic Realism stresses the
centrality of power in international
relations. Diplomacy, international
agreements, world opinion, can never substitute
for the use or threat of power. However,
unlike other realists, Kaufman maintains,
Moral Democratic Realism also recognizes
the importance of regime types, of
ideologies, in determining how states will act
in international relations. Reagan, for instance,
recognized that communist ideology
was “evil” or pathological and that the leaders
of the Soviet Union were motivated not
only by some generic self-interest but guided
by their ideological perversions. Thus, a
proper realism, as exercised paradigmatically
by Ronald Reagan, requires understanding
the ways ideas or ideologies shape the various
actors in international relations.

So also are Reagan’s stark moral judgments—”
evil empire”—paradigmatic of
Kaufman’s theoretical framework. While
not oblivious to America’s moral failures,
Reagan nonetheless believed deeply in the
basic moral goodness of the American experiment.
Because universal moral norms are
encoded in the national DNA, and because
both Reagan and Kaufman seem to think of
the United States as part of a providential
plan, America has a moral (divine?) obligation
to spread democracy, capitalism, and
freedom to benighted lands. Kaufman asserts
blithely that this moral mission has been at the
center of American self-understanding
and government
policy since George Washington’s
administration. Only prudential
judgments about the
power of the American nation
to effect these changes shaped
particular actions, but none of
America’s “great statesmen”
ever doubted the moral imperatives—
the Manifest Destiny—
that providence had
placed on this nation.

The Bush Doctrine is but a
prudential expression of Moral Democratic
Realism to meet the particular needs of a new
threat after 9/11. The Bush Doctrine, therefore,
is not a departure from the longstanding
policy of the American regime, the
author informs us. The only innovation of
any real significance is the doctrine of preemption,
“which is necessary in light of the
convergence of radicalism, tyranny, and
WMD.” (Kaufman also claims, however,
that the doctrine of preemption was always
theoretically a part of American grand strategy.)
Democratization, which the Bush administration
has placed at the forefront of its
rhetorical defense of the current preemptive
wars, has always been an important part of
the American mission to the world.

These are familiar neoconservative arguments,
presented in this slim book with
admirable economy and with some important
qualifiers that acknowledge problems
and challenges. Still, this is a neoconservative
book in tone as much as in content. Confidence,
if not certainty, pervades the book
along with a style of argument and use of
evidence that many take to be characteristic
of neoconservatives.

This is a clannish book. Kaufman not only
develops rather rigid taxonomies so that
every person can fit into a neat box (a
characteristic disciplinary malady of the I.R.
field), but he loves the structure and comfort
of such an orderly intellectual universe.
Kaufman likes belonging to a camp, fighting
with his band of brothers, and he likes to
know the relative position of others in the
intellectual universe—their distance from his
center. To those who are with him he confers
titles of distinction—”eminent,” “noted,”
“greatest military historian.” Those who are
not generally receive no such honors.

Consistent with the tidiness of this universe,
Kaufman employs frequent reifications
(“Neoconservatism is vastly more right than
wrong…”; “The Bush Doctrine has diagnosed…”)
that allow him to translate very
complex and often messy categories into a
single thing that acts or thinks or wills. This
tendency to translate complex matters into
axioms also informs Kaufman’s moral reasoning.
Drawing cursorily from Aquinas and
defining prudence as the choosing of right
ends and right means, he develops a rudimentary
casuistry that, in conjunction with a
tendentious historical argument, provides a
tidy theory for action.

The defining characteristic of Kaufman’s
neoconservatism, in my view, is his nonhistorical
use of history. The author invokes
Reinhold Niebuhr to support his claim about
the necessity of using power to fight evil in
international relations and to stress the
fallenness that precludes any possibility of a
humanity without war and strife. Indeed,
Kaufman considers himself a Niebuhrian.
But Kaufman uses Niebuhr selectively and
ignores the theologian’s observations about
irony in history, the complex and unpredictable
results of using power for good and noble
purposes, the unavoidable way that power
corrupts good causes. While Niebuhr’s warnings
about power spring from the same
emphasis about human fallenness that is so
central to Kaufman’s defense of the Bush
Doctrine, Niebuhr’s basic philosophy of history
is profoundly at odds with Kaufman’s
need for a theoretical template to justify
action in foreign policy.

Hence, Kaufman tells the history of the
American republic in such a way as to strip
away irony, to separate out what he considers
the main thread from all surrounding and
conflicting evidence, and to declare the nature
of the regime. His target in this section
of his account is the isolationist camp led by
Patrick Buchanan—many members of which
are equally guilty of a pre-processed history
of the republic. The problem is not with the
corrective that Kaufman offers, but with the
way he uses historical evidence. In his analysis
of American policy during the Cold War
and the current war in Iraq, Kaufman surveys
(rather well in such a brief book) the
history of the past several decades. By necessity,
it must be a selective bit of story-telling:
this is true of historical analysis as such. What
is not true of historical analysis, however, is
a catalogue of “lessons of history” that a
politician might apply blithely to new circumstances
without concern for either the
necessary complexity and singularity of all
historical events or the Niebuhrian irony that
attends all human choices.

One example will suffice. Kaufman predictably
uses the examples of the democratization
and liberalization of Germany and
Japan after World War II to demonstrate that
the democratization agenda of the Bush
administration is not only possible but prudent.
Ignoring the question of whether the
United States should seek to impose liberal
democracy on other nations, we are still left
with the question of whether this historical
example offers an appropriate analogy to
current circumstances. Kaufman offers these
successful democratizations projects to suggest
that those who insist that democracy
cannot be imposed and that it must grow
organically are wrong in at least these circumstances.
(Kaufman does not seem to be
aware of the voluminous literature on more
recent, and less successful, efforts at democratization.)
But a historical assessment of
these events, if they are to be used as analogies,
requires a serious assessment of their
applicability to current circumstances.
Kaufman can list the similarities, but I find
the difference between, say, Japan in 1945
and Iraq in 2007, to be profound and of such
a nature as to make analogies suspect. Consider,
for example, the context of total defeat
and devastation in Japan, the role of an
emperor in “commanding” the transition to
democracy, Japan’s homogeneity compared
to the deep pluralism of Iraq, and the ongoing
struggle with a stateless and undefeated
enemy in Iraq, etc.

Many historical analogies, at least as used
by neoconservatives, emphasize the powerful
and efficacious nature of a prescient
leader. Because of the leadership of a Churchill
or a Truman or a Reagan, each working
against great odds and proceeding with unpopular
views, the forces of light defeated
temporarily the forces of darkness. In some
cases—credit to Robert Kaufman for only
hinting at this—these historical examples
illustrate that success is a matter of two things
working in tandem: a clear and unambiguous
theory that informs leaders how to act
and great willpower (leadership) to accomplish
what fickle public opinion does not
often support. This being the case, however,
failure in any particular case may always be
blamed on a failure of nerve, rather than a
faulty theory: the theory becomes unfalsifiable.

Kaufman’s epilogue addresses this issue, at
least indirectly. In 2007 one detects evidence
that President Bush is himself about to give
up on the Bush Doctrine and that many
erstwhile supporters are backing away. “I
have not yet lost hope” Kaufman writes
plaintively, “that the president will remain
faithful to the Bush Doctrine.” This book,
then, seems best understood as an appeal to
the faithful and to recent apostates. The
author has compiled, better than anywhere
else that I have seen, a systematic explanation
of the Bush Doctrine and its moral and
historical foundations. But even if such is the
case, and even if Kaufman succeeds in bringing
the wandering sheep back into the fold,
isn’t the larger question whether the Bush
administration and the neoconservative supporters
of the war can make an appeal that
persuades the broader public opinion rather
than insider partisan opinion?

Many there are who reject the neoconservative
theoretical framework and its simplistic
historical foundations but who otherwise
support the war: I am one such person.
We are not isolationists but neither are we
ideologues. We do not use abstract theories
to determine our responses. We believe that
the nature of the current threat is so insidious
that we risk, ultimately, the loss of our culture
if we do not win the war. Irony and complexity—
so important to many of us who
find ourselves uncomfortable supporters of
an imperialistic war—are poor weapons in a
war on terror. And yet conservatives ought
to understand the nature of a democracy at
war and the need for a clear and unambiguous
cause. We have not seen much evidence
that neoconservative ideology (or the
neoconservative manner) is effective at creating
the public support necessary for a
protracted war. But between irony and
ideology lies a shared cause that will rally
support in a war to save our culture from the
universalizing oblivion of a most unironic
enemy.