Like Father Like Son? The Rhetoric of Human Rights and National Security in the Bush Presidencies.

In the words of human rights scholar David Forsythe, George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy incorporated “moral impulses as long as they did not prove inconvenient to expediential concerns,” (1995:126). In short, analysts have argued that human rights was approached pragmatically during the first Bush presidency, subordinated in realist fashion to broader strategic concerns and the considerations of post-Cold War power politics. But what of the son? By contrast, the presidency of George W. Bush has seemed to feature a shifting stance on the question of balancing human rights concerns and national security interests. As a candidate and in the first months of his presidency, George W. Bush largely echoed his father’s realist and pragmatic approach. For example, while committed to the promotion of political openness and economic growth abroad, on the question of humanitarian interventions, the initial position of the Bush team was to shun such operations unless larger regional or strategic interests were at stake. Yet by 2006 the Bush administration had embraced an apparent liberal interventionist stance toward the promotion of human rights, declaring in National Security Strategy 2006 that “… the United States seeks to extend freedom across the globe by leading an international effort to end tyranny and to promote effective democracy,” (2006:2). In this paper I will compare the approach to human rights and national security policy during the two Bush presidencies, identifying and accounting for key areas of similarity and difference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]