Robert Kagan: Bush Has Now Moved Beyond the War on Terrorism

The most significant thing about President Bush's inaugural address was the word he did not utter: terror. The War on Terror has been the administration's foreign policy paradigm, giving unity and coherence to disparate and morally contradictory policies: promoting democracy in the Middle East, for instance, while ignoring undemocratic practices in Russia and China. One would have expected Mr. Bush to make the war on terror the theme of his address.

That he did not shows a remarkable evolution in Mr. Bush's thinking over the past half-decade. That evolution has gone through three phases. The first was realist retrenchment. Mr. Bush came to office intending to pull America back from what he, his advisers, most Republicans in Congress and most conservatives regarded as the moralistic, "humanitarian" excesses of the Clinton years. He would pursue the "national interest" narrowly defined, with a far more selective approach to involvement overseas.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11 and Mr. Bush's second foreign policy phase: the war on terror. He led the U.S. back to global involvement on a Cold War scale and with the Cold War's moral fervor....

Mr. Bush still asserts that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." But in his inaugural address he took a step beyond. In this third phase he has grounded American foreign policy in universal principles, in the Declaration of Independence and what Lincoln called its "abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times." The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake, for reasons that transcend specific threats. In short, Mr. Bush has unmoored his foreign policy from the War on Terror.

This is where Mr. Bush should lose the support of most old-fashioned conservatives. His goals are now the antithesis of conservatism. They are revolutionary. But of course -- and this is what American conservatives have generally been loathe to admit -- Mr. Bush's goals are also deeply American, for the U.S. is a revolutionary power. Mr. Bush has now found his way back to the core, universalist principles that have usually shaped American foreign policy, regardless of the nature of the threat.

Many will take an understandably cynical view of Mr. Bush's latest pronouncements. Truman's 1947 declaration that "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples" was soon followed by close ties with Spain's fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Kennedy made similar pledges and similar compromises. And when Reagan announced a "global campaign for freedom" in 1982, he had the Soviet bloc in mind, not Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, or the military junta in South Korea.

But presidential rhetoric has consequences. Reagan wound up pulling the rug out from under those friendly dictators, propelled by his own public democratic principles. Mr. Bush may not be thinking about China. But the next time China locks up a dissident, or Vladimir Putin further curtails Russian freedoms, people will remind Mr. Bush about his promise that "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains."...