Bushs Foreign Policy is Neoconservatism

This is because, a realist understands the cost of war as being very expensive compared to other alternatives like diplomacy. It is therefore undoubtable that, since president bush’s actions cannot be aligned to the theory of realism, his foreign policy was guided by neo-conservatism. George Bush is a Neoconservatist? The decision to go against Iraq using the military power and abilities as opposed to diplomacy falls within the neoconservative theory. Neo conservative theory is essentially wilsonian with teeth The Bush doctrine as it is known as an idealist and a power stand. This doctrine is referred to as a Wilsonian with teeth where Wilsonian provides the idealism while an emphasis on military power by president bush provides the teeth. They think that, if a country with such immense military powers, the United States can show its military muscle by threatening its adversaries then all the countries and friends of the U.

S. will see that the U. S means business in its operations across the world. In return, this means that the rest of the world will stand away in fear of the military force of U. The critics of the Iraq war say that it wouldn’t make any sense to try and solve the historical conflict between the Israeli and the Palestinians. The neoconservatives would argue that if the U. S. had victory over Iraq then the president of Iraq Yasser Arafat would have to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Using the bandwagon logic, president bush forced his way into the Iraq war trying to force them to come onboard in signing the peace treaty with Israel. The United States is seen as one of the white hats.

Is the U. S. , therefore, succeeded in creating a world saturated with democracies then there would be no war as democracies don’t fight one another. This is what Francis Fukuyama calls the end of history, where every state looks like democratic America. The Bush doctrine emphasizes the importance of democracy, especially in the Islamic world. Taking democracy to Iraq was the first major effort by Bush's administration although some still argued that the war against Afghanistan was the first step and Iraq was a subsequent effort. Neither Bush nor the neoconservatives made a concerted effort to explain to the world how democracy was going to be established in the Middle East a place that had totally no historical traces of democracy.

The only basis of their decision was that when Saddam Hussein and other tyrants were removed from power then democracy would start taking root in the Middle East (Mearsheimer). Nation-building, which Neo-Cons seek to promote is unpalatable to the realists who believe that bringing democracy to places where it has been unseen is unwise. Mearsheimer asserts that great power maximize their relative power, forced by their search for security forced by the archaic structure supported by the international society (Snyder, 2002). Most people in the world, especially the Middle East, end up seeing president bush and his administration as being a bully and not a liberator. The other problem of Neo-conservatives is the way they portray themselves as being white hats in the world.