The Jervis Analysis of the Bush Doctrine

Another way of examining and analyzing the United States’ foreign policy under the Bush administration is our innate ability to exercise and flex our strength around the world, which is again unparalleled by any other nation-state. Being a hegemonic nation and society, the single true superpower in the global landscape, gives the U.S. and our leaders the capacity to blow past any thought of unification and allegiance with other nations. Jervis brings to light the fact that the United States has so much power and so much involvement in the rest of the world, in both hemispheres and on every continent, that we as a people feel we must intervene because we have an embedded interest. We in the U.S. feel we must take care of all of our own and many of other countries’ problems because we are the only nation that has the ability to perform that kind of babysitting. Again, this is distinctly a second level way of approaching the Bush doctrine. It is a born understanding within our nation—a part of our culture and ideology. While it enables our country to maximize our power and gain a relative advantage over everyone else (which we basically end up having anyway), this wasn’t the approach of the Bush administration toward engaging ourselves into the Middle East. The idea of protecting our assets, whether it be safety or otherwise, was the rationale behind this aggression.  Jervis would make the argument that the more that power grows, the more you feel you have to use it and the more you feel you have to do. Which leads to his approach that 9/11 was largely an accident waiting to happen, and while the Bush administration was largely inactive in international politics prior to that day, these attacks gave them that jumpstart to becoming involved. It was reasonably understood that at some point another terrorist attack would be launched against America, and again, with the distinct, unique set of American traits that cannot be seen anywhere else in the world, this was the firestorm and brewing of events that enabled the response we ultimately took. The unilateralist, preemptive measures driven by the Bush administration, are something that only our government, with our separation of power and high level of nationalism, and the perfect mixing of our societal elements, could be able to pull off.

Jervis takes the approach that the Bush administration used a far from realist approach in their foreign policy, and that their actions can be best examined and explained through a second level approach. While our power gives us the distinct and unmatched ability to flex our muscles and throw our weight and money in a certain direction, the foreign policy under Bush was developed because of the American culture and ideology, not because of the hunger for power maximization. Many Americans believe we are the world’s finest nation, that democracy is the finest form of government, and that we are the world’s lone superpower. Given that the administration we were governed by for eight years definitively embodied those exact ideals, the way in which we represented and extended ourselves around the globe was unique and can be explained in terms by the types of rationale that the second level of analysis uses to examine foreign policy and international politics.