29 Oct Is There a New Bush Doctrine?
It’s a little late in the Bush administration to be creating new foreign policy doctrines, but the NYT suggests that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates did just that in his speech yesterday at the Carnegie Endowment. According to the NYT, this is the key sentence is the most expansive articulation yet of the nuclear deterrence policy:
Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group or other nonstate actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction — whether by facilitating, financing or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts,
I don’t really see anything radical here, but then again I haven’t been parsing this stuff as carefully as some folks. I think that the NYT sees this as expanding deterrence and threats of military retaliation, not just against the states that use nukes against the US, but to any state that aids a terrorist group in obtaining nukes or WMDs.
As a legal matter, this is possibly a new and independent assertion of the President’s constitutional powers to use military force against WMDs and terrorists, since there is no emphasis here on the Sept. 11 resolution that limits such acts to groups that were involved in Sept. 11. Or it might be nothing. Since there are rumors that President Obama (?) would keep Gates on , at least for a while, maybe this doctrine has a future?
Whether or not this statement is new depends on what it purports to say. One main question here is whether “hold . . . fully accountable” means will use force (or consider using force) against. Assuming that this is so, there are two points of note in this statement. First, the US will use force directed not just against States but also directed at non-State groups. Second, the US will use force against those who not only use weapons of mass destruction but those who obtain it or those who facilitate, finance, provide or otherwise assist in obtaining WMD. Arguably, neither is a new doctrine for the US leaving only the question of whether they are consistent with international law. The first point above – the US will use force against non-State actors – represents what the US did in Afghanistan post 9/11, what it has done in Somalia at various points in the past couple of years, in Yemen, and more recently in Pakistan. Other states have asserted a similar right. Think of Turkey in Northern Iraq (with regard to the PKK), Uganda and Rwanda in the DRC, Columbia in Ecuador (with regard to FARC). The question is whether it is lawful for… Read more »
[…] Ku at Opinion Juris says this is “possibly a new and independent assertion of the President’s constitutional […]