arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Following the concepts of "humanitarian intervention" and "limited sovereignty" invented in Washington the United States seems to be about to "please" the international community with a new innovation. The George Bush administration is presently developing a new strategic doctrine stipulating the possibility of making "preventive strikes" against those states which, according to Washington, threaten to use weapons of mass destruction against the USA.

Referring to sources in the Bush administration, the Washington Post reported that the new US national security doctrine will be published in a few months. According to some consultants from the US Department of Defence, by working out the new doctrine George Bush attempts "to prepare the US people for a certain preventive step" against Iraq. However, strategists from the White House and the Pentagon are hardly likely to reduce the "defensive intervention" concept to such a limit.
By provoking the North Atlantic Alliance to stage an unsanctioned aggression against Yugoslavia the Americans clearly demonstrated what the "humanitarian intervention" concept means in practice.

The result is world-known-thousands of civilians were killed, a severe damage was done to the Yugoslav economy, Albanian nationalists and militant leaders from the terrorist organisation Kosovo Liberation Army came to power and the situation in neighbouring Macedonia got destabilised.

However, the concepts of "humanitarian intervention" and "limited sovereignty" just like the notorious thesis about the "axis of evil" are becoming too "tight" for Washington.

Now the US should give more universal grounds for military operations against any state if its policy does not for some reasons suit the US administration. In a broader sense, foundation is needed for the US policy aimed at taking the world's power lead. It has been increasingly clear of late that the incumbent US administration is prosecuting this very policy without taking into consideration that it contradicts the interests of the international community and the global strategic stability.

The events of the past 18 months the George Bush administration has been in office of the White House are convincing of that. The first signal was the 2003 draft federal budget Bush submitted to Congress past January. It marked a sharp militarisation spiral of the country's economy. The President proposed the largest over the past 20 years increase in assignments for defence. Next year the Pentagon is to be given $379 billion. This sum is to reach $451 billion in 2007. Bush's decision to abrogate the 1972 Soviet-US ABM Treaty and to develop a national missile defence system is also aimed at enhancing the US military power. Indeed, this May the United States signed an agreement with Russia on strategic offensive arms cuts under which both sides should reduce their warheads to 1,700-2,200 by the year 2012. However, next year the Pentagon is to receive tens of billions of dollars for the purchase of new armaments, including high-precision arms, which, according to experts, might in the future replace ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. By 2010 the US Department of Defence plans to develop a few tens of thousands of cruise long-range missiles which experts classify as high-precision weapons.

It's an open secret that the Bush administration has refused to submit the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty for ratification to Congress. In this context, the Pentagon's repeated allegations concerning an urgent need to resume nuclear tests and develop low-power nuclear munitions, which are quite likely to be used in regional conflicts against countries without nuclear potential, sound increasingly alarming. It's hardly worth proving that such plans are fraught with lowering the level of the possible use of nuclear arms as a result of which the very approach to this problem might change. If that happens, the new strategy may change the status of nuclear weapons from deterrence means to tactical munitions.

Together with regional instability, this approach of Washington to the nuclear weapons use poses a great danger to the whole international security system.

All these facts make the danger of the US administration's intention to include provisions stipulating possible "preventive strikes" and "defensive intervention" in the new strategic doctrine being drafted now only too evident.