The Big Idea: A Doctrine Passes

President George W. Bush's doctrine of preemptive self-defence has got a big thumbs down from an iconic figure of American diplomacy. Commenting on the Bush doctrine in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, George Kennan , the author of the policy of containment and doctrine of deterrence, said "I could see justification only if the absence of it would involve a major and imminent danger to our own country, or, at worst, to our most intimate and traditional allies. Of this I see no evidence." If Iraq has cultivated weapons of mass destruction, Kennan argued, the greatest threat would probably be to its neighbors, particularly Israel, rather than to the United States, and so "it would be up to the government of that country to estimate the extent of the danger and to find the most fitting answer to it." – YaleGlobal