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August 5, 2004
This article by Karl E. Meyer in the World Policy Journal highlights the concern many Australians have with the imperial Bush presidency.
Meyer traces the imperial tendencies to the state paper, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, of September 2002. This states:
"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.”
Meyer says that the paper maintained that America’s unparalleled supremacy had to be sustained beyond challenge to counter the terrorist threat and to expand democracy and free markets. He said that most striking was the president’s affirmation of America’s right to wage preventive or preemptive war. In his words:
“We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [because] the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”
Meyer says that what underlies his dissent---and mine ---is not the new doctrine’s declared goals but the absence of any harness on America’s interventions and the shallow reasoning put forward to justify unilateral resort to force. Meyers is disconcerted by the overall tone of political rhetoric that pervaded the war’s approving chorus: the caustic dismissal of valid reservations and the unabashed assertion of imperial entitlement.
What this gives us is the Bush offensive against any treaty, compact, protocol, or convention that in might in any way limit America’s freedom of action. Nothing must limit America's course of action.
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