The Bush Strategy in Historical PerspectiveMarc TrachtenbergDepartment of Political ScienceUniversity of California at Los AngelesSeptember 25, 2003 (7)To be published in a volume on the Nuclear PostureReview to be edited by James Wirtz (Palgrave Press)In September 2002, a year after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the U.S. government published an important document: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. That document laid out what was called a strategy of “preemption.” The enemies of America, countries like Iraq and North Korea, were intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and those weapons, it was argued, could be used “offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes.” In such circumstances, a purely “reactive” policy—a strategy of “deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation”—was no longer good enough. America would instead exercise its “right of self-defense by acting preemptively”—that is, by dealing with “such emerging threats before they were fully formed.” And in dealing with those threats, the U.S. government would “not hesitate to act alone.” “In the new world we have entered,” the National Security Strategy document declared, "the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”1The George W. Bush administration, the administration that had issued that document, was sharply criticized both at home and abroad for embracing a strategy of this sort. But this was not the first time the Bush administration was attacked for opting for a “preemptive” strategy. A half-year earlier, the leak to the press of the Pentagon’s “Nuclear Posture Review” [NPR] had touched off what one observer called a “mini-firestorm.”2 The administration was in fact charged at that time with moving toward a policy of nuclear preemption. “U.S. Nuclear Arms Stance Modified by Policy Study: Preemptive Strike Becomes an Option”: this was the headline of the Washington Post’s main article on the NPR.3 And according to a New York Timeseditorial entitled “America as Nuclear Rogue,” the NPR showed that that the government was “contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers.”4 The administration, itwas argued, had broken with tradition: in the past, “non-nuclear states were exempt from U.S. nuclear attack,” but now it seemed that that policy had been abandoned.5 In the past, U.S. nuclear forces had been maintained “for the single purpose of deterring a nuclear attack.” But theNPR, the critics said, signaled “an unfortunate reversal” of that “longstanding policy, ending the taboo against nuclear weapons by including them in the full range of weapons to be used against countries with which the U.S. has major disagreements.”6Administration officials denied that the NPR was to be interpreted in those terms. Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, happened to be testifying before a Senate Committee the day the Times editorial appeared, and he was asked about the press stories on the NPR. “With respect to reports that we are thinking of preemptively going after somebody,” he said, “or that, in one editorial I read this morning, we have lowered the nuclear threshold, we have done no such thing. There is no way to read that document and come to the conclusion thatthe United States will be more likely or will more quickly go to the use of nuclear weapons.”7 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony before a Senate committee a couple of months later, said much the same thing: the press reports were inaccurate; the “recently-concluded nuclear posture review does not change the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons one bit.”8 And indeed, judging from the excerpts from the NPR that were posted on the internet—presumably the most revealing parts of the document—it does not seem that the authors of that document were calling for a strategy of “nuclear preemption.” In fact—again, judging from those excerpts—the main problem with the NPR was perhaps that it failed to give a very clear sense for when or how nuclear weapons were actually to be used.The Bush strategy was thus not quite as extreme as it was made out to be. Yes, the United States felt free to deal with developing threats before they got totally out of hand. And 2yes, the U.S. government felt free to use force before an attack had actually been mounted or waseven considered imminent. But one has the sense that in acting “preemptively,” basically only non-nuclear force was to be used. To be sure, in certain cases the Americans might use nuclear weapons first. The United States might in fact use them against a non-nuclear state. If America were attacked with biological or chemical weapons, a retaliatory nuclear strike was not ruled out (and indeed nuclear retaliation in such circumstances had not been ruled out by previous administrations).9 And in the event of war certain specially-designed types of nuclear weapons might be used to destroy facilities where an enemy’s most dangerous weapons were stored before they could be used.10 But one has the sense that to the extent that dangerous regimes wereto be prevented through military action from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, those military operations would not normally involve the use of nuclear weapons of any sort.But even a policy of “preemption” that relied on conventional forces was considered quite extreme, especially after it became clear during the run-up to the war with Iraq in 2002-2003 that the Bush administration was serious about pursuing a policy of this sort. That war waswidely seen as a “preemptive” operation—that is, as designed to prevent an intolerable situation from emerging, and indeed the administration explicitly justified its Iraq policy in those terms. Itstressed the importance of resolving the Iraq problem before that country’s weapons programs had developed to the point where the threat had become much greater. In one key policy speech,Vice President Cheney quoted Henry Kissinger as saying that the various elements in the Iraq problem had combined to “produce an imperative for preemptive action.” Cheney himself fully agreed and said: “If the United States could have preempted 9/11, we would have, no question. Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will, no question.