INVASION VS. PERSUASION.(The Talk of the Town)

President Bush has put the idea of spreading democracy around the world at the rhetorical heart of American foreign policy. No one should doubt that he and his surviving senior advisers believe in what they call the "forward strategy of freedom," even if they've had to talk themselves into it. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush himself are latecomers to the idea; in earlier incarnations, they sounded a lot more like Henry Kissinger than like Woodrow Wilson. By now, though, it's clear that, however clumsy and selective the execution, Bush wants democratization to be his legacy. So when his critics, here and abroad, claim that his rhetoric merely provides cynical cover for an American power grab, they misjudge his sincerity and tend to sound like defenders of the status quo. And when the Administration tries to wring every last sweet drop of partisan gain from its foreign policy (sincerity is not the same thing as honesty), critics are driven to conclude that "democracy" is just another word for "neoconservatism."

This is not a good position for the opposition to be in, either morally or politically. The best role for critics in the President's second term will be not to scoff at the idea of spreading freedom but to take it seriously--to hold him to his own talk. The hard question isn't whether America should try to enlarge the democratic order but how. It's a question that the Administration seems to have thought about very little, yet it makes a big difference. Look at the two examples from the week's front pages: where the approach has been subtle and collective, the outcome seems hopeful; where it has been noisy and unilateralist, it does not.

The popular uprising in Ukraine has now secured a new Presidential election, the previous vote having been discredited by huge fraud. There's a quiet American story behind that achievement. For years, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, governmental and non-governmental organizations poured millions of dollars into Ukraine's politics, building up the parties, training civil-society groups and journalists, establishing election monitors. These efforts helped strengthen the opposition against a corrupt government, but they were nonpartisan: technical support was given to all parties. The work in Ukraine built on earlier experiences in Serbia and Georgia, where groups like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute contributed, behind the scenes, to popular movements that eventually seized the moment to overthrow strongmen. Three peaceful democratic revolutions in ex-Communist countries in four years--a tremendous success, and few Americans even know that part of the credit belongs to this country.

Not surprisingly, the outgoing President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, have complained about American meddling. So has an unlikely tandem in this country. "Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by Washington, which refuses to abandon its Cold War policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet Republic into its orbit," The Nation claimed, once again taking the Russian side of the Cold War. And Pat Buchanan declared, "Congress should investigate N.E.D. and any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election, as the U.S. media appear to have gone into the tank for global ...