Writing about American foreign policy in this new millennium has become a voyage into the murk. But whichever of the four, five or six versions of the Bush doctrine one prefers, it is worth recalling that in June 2002, in a landmark speech at West Point, the president issued a vital declaration that at the core of America's interests is the defense of liberty for all: "Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom."
And in some places, it has. To the credit of George W. Bush, the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 have entailed not only the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, but a determined struggle to establish beachheads of liberty in these realms that were once completely under totalitarian terror.
Elsewhere, however, America's stress on freedom abroad has faded with the bitter quarrels at home over the invasion of Iraq. Since the overthrow of Saddam, America has increasingly sidelined the push for democracy, abandoned such terms as "regime change" and stooped to haggling with tyrants and looking for love as the reborn soft-power sugar daddy of the United Nations. The prime imperative has become the political art of the deal. And in the course of the horse trading, the focus of U.S. foreign policy has shifted from the fundamentally threatening nature of tyrannical regimes to the specific arsenals that U.S. diplomats hope to pry from their hands with minimal disturbance.
Thus has Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently gone to Libya to commune with longtime despot Moammar Gadhafi, who surrendered his illicit nuclear kit in late 2003, and has since reaped rich rewards from Washington--out from under sanctions, visited by a parade of political dignitaries and seated without U.S. objection on the United Nations Security Council.
Thus does Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad head to New York next week, planning for the fourth time in four years to strut Tehran's nuclear-weapons-seeking brand of totalitarian salvation on the United Nations stage, while we hear no resounding censure from Washington of the repression inside Iran, no official peep about regime change.
Since early 2007, Washington has provided diplomatic concessions, aid, fuel and hard cash to the North Korean government from beneath the fig leaf of the Six-Party Talks. Meanwhile, dealing with Pyongyang's brutal totalitarian rule, arguably the worst on earth, ranks in Washington as a separate and less urgent matter.
With these sorts of soft-power, low-expectation priorities emanating from America, the leader of the free world, it's small wonder that despotism is on a roll in places such as Burma, Venezuela, Syria and Russia.
What's largely dropped out of the Washington foreign policy calculus is a point that former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, now a citizen of Israel, has argued brilliantly over the years: In the defense of America and her democratic allies, freedom for others is not a peripheral issue. Especially in this high-tech wired world, countries export who and what they are. As we've just seen with the Russian invasion of Georgia, repression at home is all too prone to translate into aggression abroad.
Sharansky's argument for freedom helped inspire Bush's 2002 call for the spread of democracy. In that speech, with memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks still raw, Bush spelled out how "moral clarity" was an essential element of America's victory in the Cold War. He noted, "When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause." However unpopular today, those words still apply and it is their implications that this column will explore.
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has covered foreign affairs for more than 25 years. This is the first installment of her weekly column for Forbes.com
