Karl Rove predicted in a Washington Post article today that future Presidents of the United States will embrace President George W. Bush's doctrine of preemptive war. The statement came when the top White House adviser was asked what the 43rd president's legacy would be. Michael Abramowitz reported today on the various activities Karl Rove has engaged in to promote the president's legacy. Although he has said there is an attitude of "Why worry about it?" in the White House, Abramowitz points to Rove's efforts "to put his own distinctive spin on current events and the longer historical view."
Rove has particularly spun the foreign policy of the Bush administration as groundbreaking and insisted to Abramowitz that future presidents would embrace it.
The so-called Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, Rove said, "has a logic of force and nature and reality that will cause people to examine it, adjust it, test it, resist it -- but ultimately embrace it."
At a recent event in Arkansas, Rove pointed to the legacies that presidents pick up from the institutions designed by their predecessors to offer more evidence for his claim. Reflecting on his remarks for Abramowitz, he described the process as inevitable.
"Presidents set in motion certain things that their successors evaluate and decide by and large, particularly the structural ones, to adopt," he said.
Zbigneiw Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's former National Security Adviser, questioned Rove's claim.
The next administration, he said, "will have to make serious readjustments with rationality."
