The Foreign Service Journal, October 2005

tarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent.” President Bush has elevated a broader definition of respect for human rights; from his perspective, a state can be classified as a rogue if it denies freedom to some of its citizens. But he has arrived at this determination not out of fealty to the United Nations, nor to the niceties of international law. Rather, the president’s reasoning hearkens back to the words of another pres- ident locked in a brutal struggle for justice, and who, like George Bush, perceived a divine mission in much that he did. “The rulers of outlaw regimes can know,” the president declared during his second inaugural address, “that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: ‘Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.’” The Bush Doctrine There is a fundamental contradiction within interna- tional law between the inviolability of sovereignty and the conditionality of that same sovereignty. And there is also deep disagreement as to who gets to decide when and how the responsibility to protect trumps the established rules of the game. President Bush views the rogue state as the chief threat to global order, and his foreign policies aim either to alter the behavior of rogue states, or, failing that, to eliminate those regimes that refuse to play by the rules. As Robert W. Merry explains in his recent book, Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Simon & Schuster, 2005) , the Bush Doctrine advances three core proposi- tions — pre-emption, democratization and dominance. Pre-emption typically means attacking an enemy before he attacks you. But pre-emption as practiced by the Bush administration is more accurately understood as “preventive war.” Although pre-emption of an imminent attack has long been accepted under international law, preventive war —whereby a government chooses to take F O C U S O C T O B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27