Geopolitics, the revolution in military affairs, and the Bush doctrine

The destruction of the Persian empire of Darius III dramatically changed the political arrangements of his time and did so by the application of the superior military capabilities of a relatively small force and the shock effect of rapid mobility. [...] Subsequently the paper examines the geopolitical logic of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review and the popular articulation of the Bush doctrine in Thomas Barnett’s (2004, 2005) writing, with its explicit remapping of the world as the context for Dalby g Geopolitics, the Revolution in Military Affairs, and the Bush Doctrine / 3 understanding the doctrine and the necessity of warfare in the Middle E [...] GLOBAL WARFARE In the aftermath of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disappearance of much of its military capability, and declarations by George Bush senior of a new world order, American military planners began to think about the new situation and what might be done with American dominance. [...] However, given the acknowledged global scope of the U. S. armed forces, and the expressed desire to remake distant societies so as to stifle the emergence of threats to the metropolitan centre, it is not much of a stretch to argue that imperial pacification is the mandate of the war on terror, and that a debate over the semantics of empire is unnecessary (Johnston 2007; Kaplan 2005, 2007). [...] Dalby g Geopolitics, the Revolution in Military Affairs, and the Bush Doctrine / 10 Even so, the military globalism of the war on terror is predicated on a fundamental change in the specification of America’s place in the world.