The End of the Bush Revolution

READING OVER President George W. Bush's March 2006 National Security Strategy, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence that the president has backed away from what has become known as the Bush doctrine. America is at war, says the document; we will fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our Talk to any senior administration official, and he or she will tell you that the president is as committed as ever to the revolutionary foreign policy principles he spelled out after 9/11: the United States is fighting a war on terror and must remain on the offensive and ready to alone, U.S. power is the foundation of global order, and the spread of democracy and freedom is the key to a safer and more peaceftil world. Bush reiterated such thinking in his 2006 State of the Union address, insisting that the United States will act boldly in freedom's cause and never surrender to evil. But if the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution itself is over. The question is not whether the president and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine-they do-but whether they can sustain it. They cannot. Although the