John Kerry's position on

National Security Strategy: On September 20, 2002 President George W. Bush released, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) which details the way the United States foreign policy will operate in a changing security environment and, in particular, the way the United States will respond to the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Candidate's position: George W. Bush proposed the National Security Strategy of the United States of America as a way to deal with the threats posed by WMD in a changing world. John Kerry's believe is that, "Defeating this threat requires American leadership of the highest order---leadership that brings our allies to greater collaboration, our friends to greater vigilance, our partners to greater participation." link Kerry & Edwards support multilateral efforts to counter the proliferation of WMD and continued threats of terrorism. This includes support for multilateral export controls on nuclear materials and continued cooperation with our allies. 

Quotation: "…every President from the beginning….has had a sufficient doctrine of preemption. Throughout the Cold War, the entire first strike doctrine was based on a doctrine of preemption. But, that's very different from the Bush doctrine of preemption. I don't subscribe to the George Bush doctrine as he has described it, which is very different. It's a preemptive war for the purpose of removing, simply removing the dictator." (ABC's This Week, interview with George Stephanopolous, 2/22/04)

"Like all Americans, I responded to President Bush's reassuring words in the days after September 11th. But since then, his actions have fallen short. I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the War on Terror; I believe he's done too little. Where he's acted, his doctrine of unilateral preemption has driven away our allies and cost us the support of other nations. Iraq is in disarray, with American troops still bogged down in a deadly guerrilla war with no exit in sight. In Afghanistan, the area outside Kabul is sliding back into the hands of a resurgent Taliban and emboldened warlords. "(Remarks by John Kerry, February 27, 2004)

Assessment of the Proposal: 

Positive: Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Adviser to the Center for Defense Information endorses the Kerry-Edwards National Security Strategy when he says, "Sen. John Kerry, has correctly noted that the Bush Administration has abandoned the fundamental tenets that have guided our foreign policy for more than half a century…", he continues, "It is the Democratic Party that now carries on the Eisenhower legacy and is therefore much better equipped to protect our National Security than the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis that currently dominates the Republican Party." (3/16/04)

Negative: Steven Welsh, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information makes the argument that possibly Kerry's national security doctrine concerning preemption may still go further than traditional conceptions of the term, "But there potentially is an argument to be made -- perhaps one of semantics -- that however commonplace the terminology has become, even Kerry's statement of his standard for anticipatory self-defense goes further than traditional limitations on launching an anticipatory first strike. While it has become more commonplace to refer to the idea of responding to "an imminent threat," the traditional standard was that anticipatory self-defense might be permissible in response, not to an imminent threat, but to the threat of an imminent attack. That is, the standard was that one could launch a preemptive first strike but still attempt to call it defensive if it was launched against an adversary that itself was preparing to mount an actual attack &endash; that is, if an attack by the adversary was imminent, leaving no time for deliberation and no choice regarding the response to defend against it. In other words, the traditional standard was not simply that there was a threat out there, that a "threat" in some vague sense was about to be simply be in existence. The question remains, what does Kerry mean by "imminent threat" and how threatening does a threat have to be for Kerry to be willing to go to war." (Center for Defense Information, 7/30/04)

Comparison: The Kerry-Edwards position on the NSS is that preemptive war can be an option of a sovereign state but should not be stated as doctrine. This could be described as "strategic ambiguity". This was a fundamental part of Cold War nuclear weapons doctrine. First strike capabilities have always been considered important as part of our deterrent, but preemption as policy has seldom been stated as doctrine. The Kerry-Edwards position is that a stated doctrine of preemption threatens National Security, while the Bush Administration believes that it strengthens our deterrent.

Link to Bush's issue page