Bush Whistles Dixie.(George W. Bush United States)

When it comes to foreign policy, George W. Bush has broken radically with the bipartisan tradition of liberal internationalism, shared by both his father and Bill Clinton. Even before 9-11, he was repudiating treaties, ignoring the United Nations and sidelining NATO allies. The administration has announced a grandiose global strategy of unilateral American domination, even as it has abandoned its time-honored role of honest broker in the Middle East and embraced, almost completely, Ariel Sharon's war of occupation against millions of Palestinians.

How to explain this dramatic break with tradition? Where does the Bush administration's profoundly conservative America-firstism come from? For a clue, look to the same region that's causing trouble for the Republican leadership right now--the American South. The political base of the Republican Party is the South, coupled with the Prairie and Rocky Mountain states. The Bush Doctrine may enrage the largely Northeastern foreign-policy establishment. But it plays well below the Mason-Dixon Line, not least because it melds two Old Dixie traditions-- militarism and Protestant fundamentalism.

Consider the new unilateralist impulse, which holds that the United States should maintain its overwhelming global power and sway in the world, even if that means downgrading old alliances and considering pre-emptive wars. To the liberal and pluralist Northeastern and West Coast, the very idea is alien. To much of the South, by contrast, it is only logical. White Southerners are the most martial subculture in the United States. Private military academies are as commonplace in the South as liberal-arts colleges are in New England. Southern whites have always been, and remain, over represented in the U.S. military--and underrepresented in the diplomatic corps.

It has always been so. From the 18th century until the present, Southerners have been more eager than white Northerners to support wars. "From the quasi-war with France [in 1798] to the Vietnam War, the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against," writes the historian David Hackett Fischer. In a Gallup poll last August, Midwesterners were almost evenly divided about going to war in Iraq--47 percent in favor and 44 percent against--while Southerners favored an invasion by 62 percent to 34 percent.

When the House of Representatives voted on Oct. 10 to authorize the president to go to war against Iraq, a majority of Democrats voted against the resolution. Democrats who broke with their party to support Bush were mostly from Southern states like Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi. The entire Democratic delegation of Tennessee joined all of their Republican colleagues in voting for war. The journalist John B. Judis described the profile of these different constituencies: "a high-school-educated white male from the rural or small-town South."

Southern militarism is often joined with a contempt for civilian diplomacy and suspicion of international organizations. In his book "Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973," Joseph Fry writes that, after World War II, "the South quickly became disillusioned with the United Nations after 1945 and persistently favored unilateral actions when U.S. interests were in question." More recently, according to polls, the groups that showed least support for U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo were Southerners and those without college degrees.

Along with unilateral militarism, Protestant ...