Bush lays out plan for US domination

By RUPERT CORNWELL

WASHINGTON - The Bush Administration has made official its new hard-nosed philosophy of America and its overwhelming power: a country that reserves the right to act pre-emptively against a potential foe, that will brook no military rival, and that regards most non-proliferation treaties as barely worth the paper they are printed on.

The approach has been evident almost from the moment George W. Bush took office, in dismissive US attitudes to non-proliferation and arms control treaties, in the "pre-emption" doctrine set out at the President's West Point speech in June, and in its campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the National Security Strategy of the US, which the White House has just sent to Congress, pulls the strands together as never before. It reveals how the attacks of last September 11 conclusively laid to rest the thinking that dominated the Cold War era.

No less striking is its language, straightforward to the point of bluntness. Bush, said the New York Times, told his staff the document had to be written in plain English because even people in small-town America ought to be able to understand it.

Deterrence in its old sense of "Mutual Assured Destruction", or Mad, is out. "There is no way in this changed world to deter those who hate the US and everything for which it stands," says the document.

America "is now threatened less by conquering states than by failing ones". The US would not hesitate to act "alone if necessary" to exercise its right to self-defence.

In the war against terrorism, Washington now vows "to convince or compel" states to accept their sovereign responsibilities: an argument it is using in the case of Iraq, even though it has produced no evidence of Iraqi support for al Qaeda.

Nor should too much faith be placed in non-proliferation treaties (evident last week in Bush's decision to scrap efforts to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention).

The new buzzword is "counterproliferation", which embraces everything from missile defence to military strikes to take out threatening weapons facilities.

The US will not permit any rival to emerge, or allow "any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the US has opened up since the fall of the Soviet Union" in 1991.

The document says the US will continue to use institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF to spread free-market doctrines, focusing "on achieving growth through sound fiscal and monetary policy, exchange-rate policy and financial sector policy".

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