The Bush Doctrine, Krauthammer, and Gibson
By E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
Saturday, September 15, 2008
Before the moment passes, I‟d like to comment on Charles Krauthammer‟s column about
what he saw as Charlie Gibson‟s “gaffe” when he questioned Sarah Palin about the Bush
doctrine.
You will recall the moment when Gibson asked, "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"
Palin acted like a student who had missed a chapter in the reading assignment. She
seemed to engage in a delaying action, hoping and praying that Gibson would define the
term for her.
Charles takes Gibson to task for presuming that there is a single meaning to the Bush
doctrine. Charles rightly notes that Wikipedia credits him with being the first to use the
term, and he argues that the Bush doctrine has had “four distinct meanings, each one
succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie
Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.”
The column is an interesting exploration of the evolving emphases of Bush‟s foreign
policy, and it made me wonder whether there could even be a Bush doctrine if it meant so
many different things.
(I also do not think that Palin‟s response to the Bush doctrine question was her worst
moment in that interview. As The Post‟s Sunday editorial noted, Palin‟s responses on
domestic issues were “disappointingly shallow.” The editorial was also right to say that
her “efforts to explain some previous statements were lacking in candor,” and to conclude
that the interview as a whole was “unsettling.”)
Where I part company with Charles is over the way he places Gibson at the center of this
story. Palin, not Gibson, is running for vice president and will be in line to be president.
Moreover, if Palin had shown any confidence when she was asked about the “Bush
doctrine,” the moment would not have received the attention it did. But she manifestly
was, well, unsettled by the question.
As for Gibson‟s definition of the Bush doctrine, I though he was rather careful in what he
said: “The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-
defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we
think is going to attack us.”
Note that Gibson used the phrase “as I understand it,” at least suggesting that he did not
pretend that his answer was the only one someone might give. And since Charles referred
to Wikipedia, I went back and found the definition of the Bush doctrine on the site as of
Sept. 8, before the Palin interview. (As many of you know, Wikipedia definitions go
through constant rewriting by readers, and there have been massive rewrites since the
Palin interview and Charles‟s column. I wanted to see the pre-interview definition.)
Here‟s the beginning of the Sept. 8 Wikipedia entry: “The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used
to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W.
Bush, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The phrase initially
described the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or
give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion
of Afghanistan. Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial
policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign
regimes that represented a threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat
was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting
democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating
the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral
way.”
On the whole, I think Gibson‟s definition of the doctrine was a fairly true, if brief,
summary of this entry. At the least, as the Wikipedia entry shows, Gibson was expressing
a rather widely held view of how the term should be defined.
Charles's initial reaction to Palin‟s selection, on this blog and in a Sept. 5 column, was
highly skeptical. While calling her an “admirable and formidable woman,” he also said
that McCain‟s choice of her as a running mate was “deeply problematic.”
In that column, Charles also wrote this: “The gamble is enormous. In a stroke, McCain
gratuitously forfeited his most powerful argument against Obama. And this was even
before Palin's inevitable liabilities began to pile up -- inevitable because any previously
unvetted neophyte has „issues.‟ The kid. The state trooper investigation. And worst, the
paucity of any Palin record or expressed conviction on the major issues of our time.”
I thought Charles showed real courage when he broke with most of his conservative
colleagues to offer this candid assessment. (David Frum of the National Review showed a
similarly admirable independence.) Charles was right the first time. And I think the
Charlie Gibson interview only lends additional support to his original intuition.