The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 177

The United States would preside over a global hierarchy in which no state or coalition of
states could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, or enforcer. The United States
would be so much more powerful than other major states that strategic rivalries and security
competition among the great powers will disappear, leaving everyone—not just the United
States—better off. As such, American unipolar power was seen by the Bush administration
as a global public good. American power was to be used to transform international politics
itself, making old balance-of-power rivalries obsolete.
As many observers noted at the time, this was a remarkable statement of American global
ambition. It shared with American liberal visions of the past a desire to move beyond the
balance-of-power system of order to a world undivided by geopolitical blocs and competitive
great powers. Fareed Zakaria observes that President Bush's vision was the most Wilsonian
statement since Wilson himself announced the American power would be used to “create a
dominion of right.” 57 But what distinguished Bush from Wilson is that in the new concep-
tion, the United States would stand above other countries within the global power structure,
aggregating and deploying unipolar military power to maintain order. Unlike Wilson's, the
Bush vision did not involve efforts to strengthen the rule-based character of international or-
der.
The second element in the Bush grand strategy was the universal scope of America's
security domain. The United States would need to be prepared—and would assume the
right—to use military force throughout the world. This imperative followed from the nature
of the new security threats. The grim new reality was that small groups of terrorists—possibly
aided by hostile states—might soon acquire highly destructive nuclear, chemical, and bio-
logical weapons that could inflict catastrophic destruction. These terrorist groups cannot be
appeased or deterred, so they must be eliminated—which requires the ability to pursue them
wherever they may be. Under these conditions, the Bush administration asserted a claim to
the right to use military force anywhere and on a global scale. “The war on terrorists of global
reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration,” argued the 2002 National Security Strategy
report. 58 It was a war that the United States would need to take to the terrorists—not simply
defend itself and its allies but seek out and destroy its enemies where they lay in wait—and
so the United States must be able to act militarily worldwide. As Bush put it succinctly at
West Point in 2002, “the military must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark
corner of the world.” 59
This claim that the world itself was a global battlefield in which the United States must
be able to operate freely and effectively went beyond previous official conceptions. As Ian
Shapiro argues, “Before the advent of the Bush Doctrine, no U.S. government had ever as-
serted the right to act militarily anywhere in the world.” 60 To be sure, in earlier eras, the U.S.
government had had expansive notions of its rights and commitments to use force. Since the
early nineteenth century, the United States has asserted a right to use force in the Western