If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration. ~Charles Krauthammer

And then I and most other reasonably well-informed people would say that Krauthammer, his adversary and the audience also did not understand what the Bush Doctrine was.  Also, Palin apologists should get their story straight–if the “freedom agenda” is the first thing that would spring to everyone’s mind on hearing the phrase, why do so many of her defenders think otherwise? 

The main innovation of the Bush administration in U.S. foreign policy, the one for which he will be remembered for good or ill, is the placement of preventive war as a means of nonproliferation and antiterrorism at the center of national security strategy.  Related to this is the abandonment of traditional concepts of deterrence and containment.  Democracy promotion as stated U.S. policy dates back at least to the Carter administration, and the “freedom agenda” has rhetorical precedents as far back as Kennedy’s Inaugural.  What Bush did with democracy promotion that was distinctive was to marry this terrible idea to his existing terrible idea of waging preventive war against “rogue” states.  The “freedom agenda” did not replace and eliminate the earlier iteration of the Bush Doctrine, but formalized the administration’s mad ideological fixation on democratization as an addition to that Doctrine.

Suffice it to say that this line of defending Palin can only underscore how little she knows, since her defenders seem to want to emphasize how complicated and, Heaven help us, nuanced the subject is, which just drives home how unsatisfactory it is that she had to wait to hear Gibson’s definition (which essentially used the President’s own words) in order to say anything coherent about it.  If Gibson is wrong, as Palin’s defenders are so happy to point out, her parroting of his definition is doubly embarrassing, since it shows that she had no definition of her own and she also couldn’t recognize Gibson’s mistake.  Rather like the line of attack from Obama supporters against Palin’s inexperience, which just reminded everyone how relatively inexperienced Obama was, ridiculing Charlie Gibson as clueless is just makes it painfully obvious how much more clueless Palin is. 

Update: For whatever it’s worth, the cover story for the new Atlantic is overflowing in discussion of McCain’s support for pre-emption, which is what McCain calls it, and the Bush Doctrine, which supposedly no one knows how to define.