About The “Bush Doctrine”
September 12, 2008 / 6:13 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierCharles Krauhammer clarifies things for Charlie Gibson. My thought when Charlie asked that question, was this “the right of a country to defend itself preemptively when faced with an aggressive threat”. Okay, so I guess I’m wrong about it too. Here’s what he says:
He [Charlie Gibson] asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?”
She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”
Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”
ad_iconWrong.
I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush Doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush Doctrine.
Go read the whole thing.
