This oughtta be good.

On Friday, the Bush administration will publish its first comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war.

Hmm... anyone else notice scary echoes of that think-tank document that the Sunday Herald brought to light a little while ago? The one that myself and others responded to that basically called for the U.S. to stomp on all that would oppose it, and that was written by the same folks who are running the country now?

The formalization of this doctrine will probably jettison whatever good relations that the U.S. still has with the U.N., which by definition is opposed to this sort of thing (and for damned good reasons.) Especially that latter goal... the former can be justified, but what will happen if (as I've theorized in the past) Europe binds even more closely together and develops a joint military strength that rivals the U.S.? Or if China's impending status as a economic powerhouse leads it to massively develop its military might? Or, heck, what happens if Japan renounces their "self-defense clause", gets into the business of force projections, and uses some brute-force military keynesianism to pull itself out of its current malaise?

Are they the next targets?

And can they afford to assume that they won't be?

Scary stuff.