Freedom's address.(The Inaugural Speech)

PRESIDENT BUSH's foreign policy has been, roughly, neoconservative in its aggressively idealistic expression and realist in its practical application. At no time has the dichotomy been more evident than during his inaugural speech and its immediate aftermath. The speech was beautiful, achingly idealistic, and at times almost totally unrestrained in its ambitious sweep. Of course, its grander pronouncements were not meant to set forth day-to-day policy. When has an inaugural address, the prose-poem of American politics, ever served that function? But the misunderstanding of the press corps was such that administration officials had immediately to give background briefings to say, "No, we aren't going to cut off every undemocratic government on earth from relations with the United States."

Although the most ringing lines understandably won the headlines, Bush's speech contained many necessary qualifiers and caveats. His vision of democratic advance, he said, is "not primarily the task of arms." He stated that "freedom, by its nature, must be chosen" and in other countries will "reflect customs and traditions very different from our own." He stipulated that freedom's spread around the globe is "the concentrated work of generations." The emphasis wasn't placed on these lines, because no speechwriter is ever going to write an address declaring, "Prudence, that indispensable guide to all human action, that magnificent faculty given to us by God to fix our conduct, will determine how we gradually spread our ideals through an ever-shifting mixture of diplomacy, foreign aid and trade, moral suasion, and force of arms." But such is the true Bush policy (or what that policy tries to be).

The stirring pronouncements Bush made in his speech were firmly in the American tradition. Many of the lines could just as easily have been uttered by Truman, or JFK, or Reagan. American presidents since Wilson have almost all seen, or at least sold, U.S. foreign policy in idealistic terms of spreading freedom. The claims Bush made in the inaugural address about the God-granted dignity of the individual, the desirability of human freedom, and the American interest in the spread of benign government, are true. As Bush put it, the last four decades have been "defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever." The U.S. has been at the head of that advance, and should stay there.

Yet it must be said that some of Bush's lines were too unmodulated to withstand a very close reading. "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." Well, not quite. In the grubby world in which we actually live, no such total identification of our interests and ideals is possible. Our most vital interest is protecting the nation from another devastating terrorist attack (something the president declared to be his "most solemn duty"). That means, most fundamentally, killing and isolating Islamist fanatics, an imperative that must trump all others. We have military bases sprinkled through a range of nasty little Central Asian dictatorships--because having them there was so important to the war in Afghanistan. We eagerly prop up an authoritarian ruler in Pakistan who has displayed little or no interest in true liberalization, because he has been willing to chase and kill al-Qaeda members within his country. We have a close relationship to a Saudi regime that is the very picture of tyranny because it too is (after much arm-twisting) killing radicals in its country and, of course, because it has strategically crucial excess oil-production capacity.

"Success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people," Bush said of foreign governments. But success in our relations depends on many things, and in the hierarchy of strategic values human rights cannot always ...