The Self-interest of National Security

Every US administration sooner or later comes up with its own foreign policy doctrine. The Nixon doctrine, which grew out of the Vietnam war debacle, sought to steer America away from further military entanglements by relying on key regional allies to further US foreign policy goals. Bill Clinton made "aggressive multilateralism" the centrepiece of his foreign policy doctrine.

Partly as an outgrowth of the September 11 attacks, a Bush doctrine is now emerging that places pre-emptive action as a form of self-defence at its core. The strategy is to be laid out in a document that has been trumpeted as having the same weight as one of America's most influential foreign policy papers - NSC 68.

National Security memorandum No 68 was written by a joint state department-defence department committee under the supervision of Paul Nitze, a state department hawk in April 1950, during the Truman administration.

Three months earlier, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, ending America's nuclear monopoly and irrevocably changing the strategic landscape. Truman was also worried about the deteriorating relationship between Moscow and Washington as Stalin strengthened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe.

Tension had risen to new heights during the Berlin Blockade of 1948, when the Russians tried to stop supplies from reaching Berlin. The allies beat the blockade with an airlift, but the episode only confirmed - in western eyes - Stalin's malign intentions.

The "loss" of China in 1949 to the communist forces of Mao Zedong reinforced US concerns that the west was facing a dangerous threat. Determined to make a thorough review not only of America's loss of atomic monopoly, but also of its existing political and military strategy, Truman put his foreign policy advisers to work. NSC 68 was the fruit of their labours.

Completed in April of 1950 and approved as a national security policy in September, NSC 68 set out US policy for the cold war, putting containment of the Soviet Union as a primary objective. The document is infused with a sense of mission that has echoed down the decades in different administrations.

"Our position as the centre of power in the free world places a heavy responsibility upon the United States for leadership," the document said in its conclusion. "We must organise and enlist the energies and resources of the free world in a positive programme for peace which will frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination by creating a situation in the free world to which the Kremlin will be compelled to adjust."

It is a safe bet that Bush's present national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, pored over NSC 68 for inspiration in preparation for this new Bush doctrine. In fact, with a bit of tweaking here and there, substituting terrorism, or axis of evil, or rogue states for Kremlin, much that was written in 1950 could easily be applied to the present.

The new twist is the emphasis on pre-emptive action, an approach that surfaced in a Bush speech in June to the US military academy at West Point. He argued at the time that containment and deterrence were no longer sufficient in tackling terrorists and "unbalanced dictators".

We can be sure that the new Bush doctrine will make the case that the stakes in the current struggle between American and its allies will be high, just as NSC 68 did over 50 years ago.

At the time the document said: "The whole success of the proposed programme hangs ultimately on recognition by this government, the American people and all free peoples, that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake."