Great article this morning by Fareed Zakaria looking for the true inspiration for Bush's foreign policy.   He finds it in Condi Rice.  He starts with:

Perhaps the most intriguing question about George W. Bush’s foreign policy is, how did we get from candidate Bush to President Bush? During the campaign Governor Bush said little about foreign affairs but consistently struck one central theme: America is overcommitted around the world, he said, pushes its weight around too much, and tells other countries how to run their affairs too often. We need to scale back, be humble and get out of the nation-building business.

HOW DID WE GET from there to here, a situation in which President Bush embraces America’s role as world hegemon, issues diktats to the world, increases foreign aid and argues for the spread of freedom and democracy everywhere in the world, especially in the lands of Islam?

This echoes my post yesterday about the rules of the world order.   The default American "international political character" -- so strongly espoused by Candidate Bush -- is one of general isolationism with select, tactical, mutually-beneficial & mutually-voluntary international engagement.  

However, we have to pragmatically accept the realities of modern weapons technology coupled with fringe political memes.   Like it or not, we've been forced into a broader engagement with the outside world -- a position espoused by the now-President Bush.  We risk charges of imperialism because now some of our engagements will no longer be mutually-voluntary (ask the Taliban, or North Korea).

The ticket that provides us with the Moral license for this style of engagement is the Fukuyama-esque defense of the Liberal Democratic ideal.  Rice recognizes the central, and, well, unilateral role of the United States within this state of affairs esp. vis a vis the other Liberal Democracies:

I asked a senior administration official who is familiar with Rice’s thinking to explain the shift. Two forces seemed uppermost. First, the stark reality of a unipolar world. “Coming into office you realize what a tremendous vacuum there is in the world without the United States,” the senior official said, “and how enormous the gulf is between the U.S. and others in terms of maintaining stability.” Rice seems well aware that American activism can generate an anti-American backlash around the world, but she also knows that there is no alternative, especially after 9-11.

Rice also recognizes that the fabric we're trying to stitch together aren't nations but rather societies.   It's a critical distinction because of the implication that claims to nationhood fall by the wayside relative to claims of liberalism and long term peace/prosperity.   Organizations like the UN consistently mistakenly equate the two.  

...She has said repeatedly that the United States is serious about helping Arab societies become more open and democratic, especially a post-Saddam Iraq. She has been an important voice in the administration’s support of nation-building efforts in Afghanistan. “If you get a democratic Afghanistan, a reformed Palestinian Authority and a democratizing Iraq,” the official said, “they will send a powerful signal across the Muslim world.”

As Zakaria dutifully notes, this is a reversal with previous administrations' policy:

In an important speech last week, Richard Haass, a top State Department official, engaged in that rarest of acts in government, self-criticism. “In many parts of the Muslim world, and particularly in the Arab world, successive U.S. administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, have not made democratization a sufficient priority,” he noted. More significantly, the speech announced that Washington will now shift to a more “actively engaged” promotion of democratic reform in the region.