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. But what most worried Europeans67 ALLIES AT WARwas the implicit message in the speech that Bush was bent on attackingIraq.It was hard to imagine that Bush would so boldly announce thathe would not wait on events if he did not intend on taking actionbefore his next State of the Union address, a year later.Bush s articulation of the doctrine of military preemption in aspeech at West Point, New York, in June 2002 only confirmed theEuropean view that the Bush administration had a simplistic approachto foreign policy that reduced everything to the military aspects of thewar on terrorism.Speaking to the graduation ceremony of West Pointcadets, Bush described a threat with no precedent that required newthinking. He said, Deterrence means nothing against shadowy terror-ist networks with no nation or citizens to defend.Containment is notpossible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destructioncan deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to ter-rorist allies.We cannot defend America and our friends by hopingfor the best.If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will havewaited too long. Bush thus promised to take the battle to the enemy,disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. Lest anyone not get the message, Bush insisted that in the world wehave entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.And thisnation will act. The speech implied that the United States had both a right and aduty to take preemptive action, not only in the face of an imminentthreat, but even, if Washington so decided, of a potential threat.BySeptember 2002 the doctrine implied in the State of the Union andWest Point speeches was elaborated and given official status in theNational Security Strategy of the United States.The language ofthe NSS did not differ radically from similar documents issued duringthe Clinton administration, which also emphasized America s readinessto act alone if necessary.In fact the Bush document said much moreabout the value of cooperating with allies than it did about the poten-tial need for military preemption.But the Bush strategy had a far68 BUSH AND EUROPE: THE GROWING DIVIDEgreater impact and sent a message very different from the Clintondocuments, which had largely passed unnoticed.In the context of alooming debate about invading Iraq, and in the wake of two majorpresidential speeches about the need to act against growing threats, theBush NSS was seen as a completely open-ended document intended toprovide blanket authority for the unilateral use of U.S.military power.Understandably, audiences concluded that the new Bush doctrinewould soon be applied to Iraq.Various short- and long-term factors had thus come together tocreate a political environment in which the once radical notions in theState of the Union address, the National Security Strategy document,and the break with previous patterns of transatlantic diplomacy werepossible and even relatively uncontroversial at least within the U.S.domestic debate.While September 11 is central to understandingwhy the U.S.government moved away from traditional diplomaticpractices in this regard, it was not the genesis of that change.From along-term perspective, the increasing power of the United States,particularly in the military realm, created the environment in whichsuch a policy was possible.Simultaneously, Europe s preoccupationwith its internal issues, and its related unwillingness to developdeployable military power, lessened the perceived value of placatingEuropean opinion in ways that would have been given much higherpriority in the past.In the more immediate term, the experience before the Iraq crisislent credence to the idea that if America built it, they would indeedcome.Time and again, pessimists at home and abroad had predictedthat the U.S.military or American diplomacy was overreaching onthe Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, Afghanistan,and the ABM Treaty, among others.Time and again, clarity, consisten-cy, and American power had rendered the original objections of othernations to American policies essentially meaningless, at least from theperspective of the U.S.government.69 ALLIES AT WAROn some issues, such as Kyoto and the ICC, important U.S.allies inEurope did not formally adopt the U.S.position and maintained theirofficial policies in opposition to the U.S.view
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