September 16, 2004, 6:34 a.m.
Tall Order
Are Americans up for Bush’s foreign policy?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the September 27, 2004, issue of National Review.

President Bush 41 was briefly notorious for his amiable dismissal of "the vision thing." If his son's acceptance speech proves an accurate guide to Bush 43's second term, "the vision thing" will actually dominate policy — at least in foreign affairs.

The speech split more or less neatly in two. There was a slightly pedestrian list of the president's domestic aims and accomplishments followed by nobly soaring passages in which he outlined a bold foreign policy based on spreading the blessings of liberty, principally to the Middle East but in principle to wherever men labor under tyranny. Even if one disagreed with this argument or was skeptical of its practicality, one could not withhold admiration for the eloquence with which it was expressed or the sincerity that plainly inspired it.

As someone remarked, however, we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. How will this soaring Wilsonian poetry translate into prosaic policy? And will the American people sustain the historic burden that the president called on them to bear? Bush made one rhetorical concession to his critics: In contrast to earlier speeches on this theme, he now spoke of "liberty" and its blessings rather than of "democracy" as such. As an old speechwriter I am perhaps making too much of this linguistic shading, but it could conceivably have significant practical consequences.

If promoting democracy is U.S. policy, then we become adversaries of those states — Jordan, for instance — that are relatively liberal autocracies and U.S. allies. Friendly encouragement to move in a democratic direction, however, is perfectly compatible with a policy of extending the blessings of liberty. It is also the approach that dovetails best with American interests in the region. Leaning on the Saudis to liberalize their semi-totalitarian society similarly makes better sense than to urge a premature democratization likely to produce an extreme fundamentalist anti-American government. As a general rule, indeed, extending liberty is less likely to threaten stability and bring Islamofascists to power than directly promoting democracy.

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