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In the tradition.

Article Excerpt
In Defense of the Bush Doctrine, by Robert G. Kaufman (Kentucky, 264 pp., $35)

WHEN he was elected president in 2000, George W. Bush gave every indication that he, like his father before him, was a conventional "realist" in foreign affairs: committed to a grand strategy of selective engagement, and critical of the open-ended nature of the Clinton doctrine and its indiscriminate use of military force in instances not involving vital national interests. In his speeches, Bush stressed foreign-policy retrenchment and military "transformation" in preparation for the emergence of a future large peer competitor in the vein of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Neither Bush nor his advisers, most notably national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and secretary of state Colin Powell, spoke of spreading democracy throughout the world.

Then came 9/11. To the surprise of almost everyone, the president abandoned his realism and embraced an approach to foreign affairs that seems to be nothing short of revolutionary. The seeds of the "Bush Doctrine" were sown in a speech he delivered on September 20, 2001, only nine days after the attacks; the ideas were then refined and elaborated in subsequent speeches.

To say that the Bush Doctrine has been criticized is an understatement. It has been an object of scorn across the political spectrum, blamed for everything from the Iraq War to anti-Americanism in...