September 11, 2001, marks a pivotal day for American grand strategy. Homicide bombers initiated World War iv by demolishing the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and destroying part of the Pentagon. This attack shattered the optimistic illusions so prevalent during the tranquil 1990s that American foreign policy had reached the end of history: democracy was triumphant and catastrophic wars were a relic of the past. the Bush administration’s bold and ambitious grand strategy for waging the war on terror (the Bush Doctrine) has ignited a passionate debate about the purposes of American power and America’s role in the world.
The Bush Doctrine rests on two main pillars. First, the events of September 11 rudely demonstrate the inadequacy of deterrence, containment, or ex post facto responses when dealing with terrorists and rogue regimes bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD); hence, the United States cannot rule out the option of using force preemptively rather than reactively Second, the root cause of 9/11 and similarly inspired aggression is the culture of tyranny in the Middle East, which spawns fanatical, aggressive, secular, and religious despotisms; hence, the United States must promote democratic regime change in that region. Or, in the words of President Bush, “The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroad of radicalism and wmd technology” His remedy is “the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East.” the president envisages the achievement of these goals as the work of generations: “The United States is in the early years of a long struggle similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War. the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of freedom over threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion. Its content may be different from the ide-
