Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Failure of the Bush Revolution
The Bush administration, galvanized by the 2001 terrorist attacks, articulated a dramatic re-
organization of the world's security order. It was a vision of order that built on deep and
ongoing post-Westphalian shifts in the global system. The Bush administration found itself
in a world in which the United States was preeminent, the norms of sovereignty had eroded,
and new security threats appeared to render outdated the older logics of deterrence and great-
power balancing. Facing this new world of threats and opportunities, the Bush administra-
tion articulated a grand strategy in which the United States would provide order and security
from the center of the system. The United States would be the global Leviathan. That is, it
would be the global security provider, identifying threats and deploying force worldwide. It
would also stand above other states, less constrained by multilateral rules and institutions.
The United States would have an open-ended license to deploy power and intervene around
the world—and do so with fewer checks and balances. The Iraq war and the American-led
“war on terror” were the cutting edge of this new global security order. In effect, the United
States was offering a new hegemonic bargain to the world. In the end, however, the world
did not accept the terms of the new bargain. As a grand conception of a reorganized world
order, it was ultimately unwelcome and unsustainable, and it gave way with the end of the
Bush administration.
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The failures of Bush's grand strategy were multiple, involving problems of coherence,
capability, and legitimacy. To begin with, the Bush conception was built on a political con-
tradiction between its unipolar security project and its conservative nationalist impulses. In
effect, the Bush administration wanted it both ways. It wanted the United States to be a pro-
vider of global security—to provide “system functions” for the international system—and to
also assert conservative nationalist claims as a great power. But this double move is impos-
sible to sustain unless the United States would be willing, and able, to enforce order through
the systematic exercise of coercion, operating a unipolar system with little or no consent or
legitimacy.
In Bush's unipolar logic, the United States is to provide security to the world. It upholds
and enforces order as a public good. In return, the rest of the world accepts American domin-
ance. After all, it is not an inherently bad deal for most states. But when fused with conservat-
ive ideas about order, it results in a global hegemon that is fundamentally above the law and
out for itself. The idea is to use American unipolar power to replace the risks and dangers of a
balance-of-power system with the peace and stability made possible in a single, unified order.
Liberals who never liked the balance-of-power system can understand the attraction of this
vision, particularly when it is coupled with a commitment to promote democracy and human
rights. This is a vision that is not that far away from the progressive international ambitions
of Wilsonian liberalism. But when coupled with conservative nationalist ideas about the use
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