Wilson's moralism turned out to be short-lived as nuclear weapons spread and the cold war emerged. American presidents continued to espouse the virtues of freedom and the spread of American values, but balanced these idealistic ambitions with a careful eye toward guarding American security in a terrifying nuclear age. Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson condemned the brutal Soviet crackdowns during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring of 1968, but neither was willing to aid the cause of liberty enough to risk a direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan, now glorified as a warmhearted idealist, spoke eloquently of the virtues of liberty and the evils of the Soviet empire in his speeches. But he tilted much farther toward the hard-hearted realist in his actual dealings with his Soviet enemies. When Poland's Communist regime imposed martial law to quash Lech Walesa's Solidarity union movement in 1981, Reagan gave strong public support, but only quiet covert assistance-even he was not about to risk nuclear war for Gdansk. And in 1983, when terrorists killed more than two hundred American Marine peacekeepers in Beirut, Reagan made clear that U.S. forces were there to promote regional stability and American national security, not guarantee Middle Eastern freedoms. "We're not somewhere else in the world protecting someone else's interests," Reagan told the country in a televised address. "We're there protecting our own."

The cold war's end took the lid off these security constraints. The result was a decade of intellectual drift between self-interested realism and noble-minded idealism. In the early 1990s, George H. W. Bush was the ultimate pragmatic realist whose frequent use of the phrase "wouldn't be prudent" became part of Dana Carvey's hit parody on Saturday Night Live. In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton's national-security advisor, Anthony Lake, declared "enlargement" of the world's democracies the paramount post-cold-war goal, and Clinton backed it up by authorizing military interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. By 1997, a moralistic and macho Harrison Ford had replaced the bespectacled and contemplative Dana Carvey as America's favorite faux president. In the movie Air Force One, Ford gives a stirring speech where he veers off script and into our hearts by declaring, "Real peace is not just the absence of conflict. It's the presence of justice. Tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America's policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right." Nothing captured the gestalt of the moment better.

Then came 9/11, which revealed the complexities and dangers of a globalizing world and fused U.S. security interests and American ideals in new ways. As one former Bush official described it, the administration "was hit upside the head with this incredible event and were searching for what they could do." It was not easy. As Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake noted, "I don't think there's ever been a more complicated period when thinking about grand strategy." Realist considerations like governments and power still matter, said Lake, but at the same time, "the security of people abroad is more inextricably linked to the security of Americans than ever before. Globalization is a fact. And the power of governments, while extremely important, is more constrained than ever before." For officials inside the Bush administration, the visceral impact of 9/11 was dramatic. "It's one thing to think about the possibility of large-scale terrorist attacks and discuss it in an academic environment," noted Eliot Cohen, a former professor and current counselor to Secretary of State Rice. "But to drive into work and see checkpoints manned by soldiers of the national guard? And go to the Pentagon and still see the smoke rising?"

Something had to be done. The moment demanded a change of strategy. But the answer was not obvious and the options were limited. Poverty as the root cause of terrorism had been debunked: everyone knew that Osama bin Laden was wealthy, the 9/11 hijackers were well educated and middle class, and that the world's poorest countries were not producing most of the world's terrorists. Meanwhile, think tanks, universities and other repositories of foreign-policy intellectuals weren't much help, either. They had produced a Tower of Babel, filled with overlapping, competing and confusing "isms": conservatism and neoconservatism; realism, classical realism, neorealism, true realism and enlightened realism; democratic realism and democratic globalism; liberalism, liberal imperialism, liberal utopianism and liberal internationalism; Wilsonianism, Jeffersonianism and a sprinkling of other famous-people "isms," to name a few. In the post-9/11 world, nothing seemed what it was. Conservatives were cautious about change and the use of government. Neoconservatives sought radical transformation of the world and advocated the use of American power to spread American morals. Some neoconservatives argued their worldview wasn't neo; others argued it wasn't conservative. Realism was equally confusing. In the old days, realism was the worldview of tough-guy masterminds like Metternich and Kissinger, men who focused unsentimentally on promoting the national interest. For them, foreign policy was all about power-how to get it, how to use it and how to keep others from catching up. Almost overnight, however, realism was being pooh-poohed as stodgy, overly cautious, multilateralist, even wimpy.

Within this muddle, democratization was clear, attractive and readily available. It had always been part of American foreign-policy thinking in one way or another. It tapped into deep American impulses. It was vigorously advocated by many inside the administration. And it resonated with the president and Condi Rice. "The president does have a strong moral streak," said Rice. "Certain things are right. Certain things offend him. People living under tyranny offends him. And it offended him from the day he came to office." Perhaps most important, the freedom agenda had no attractive competitors. When I asked Democrats and Republicans alike what strategic alternatives to the freedom agenda existed then or now, one said poverty reduction. Most either had no answer or said there wasn't one.

Which brings us to the next president. It is not surprising that Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are running against the deeply unpopular foreign-policy record of President Bush whenever they can. Both candidates frequently criticize the Iraq War-Obama faults the president for starting it, McCain faults him for botching it. Both believe Bush has stretched the military too thin, damaged relations with allies, done too little on nuclear proliferation and gone too far with interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists. What is surprising, however, is just how much McCain and Obama share Bush's core foreign-policy belief: that American-led democratization offers the surest path to world peace. It is a testament to the lasting imprint of these ideas that foreign-policy debates in the presidential campaign are more about process and tactics than grand strategy or vision.

The similarities between McCain's thinking and Bush's are striking. McCain's signature foreign-policy essay last year was titled, "An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom." Bush's introduction to the 2006 National Security Strategy similarly argued, "Peace and international stability are most reliably built on a foundation of freedom." McCain described himself in a March 2008 foreign-policy speech as "a realistic idealist" who believes that American ideals "are transforming the world" but understands "that we have to work very hard" to build the foundations for an enduring peace. President Bush has described himself as "idealistic about our national goals, and realistic about the means to achieve them." McCain warns that autocratic regimes in the Middle East offer a "false stability" that deluded American leaders for decades and that Americans must now "expand the power and reach of freedom there" to provide an alternative to extremism, instability and terrorism-exactly the same arguments made by Secretary of State Rice in a January 2008 speech to the World Economic Forum and more recently in a Foreign Affairs article. McCain and Bush even use the same metaphors, referring to democratization as a "pillar" for peace.

Obama also advocates democratization, the spreading of American values and American moral leadership, though without the darkness of Dick Cheney or the battle cry of "One hundred years in Iraq." His is a kinder, gentler freedom agenda, but a freedom agenda nonetheless. His top foreign-policy advisors include Tony Lake and former-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Clinton officials who argued forcefully for a more muscular American moralism, who championed major humanitarian interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, and who called for the spread of democracy worldwide.¹ Even Obama's former top advisor, journalist Samantha Power, made her name chronicling twentieth-century genocides and issuing calls to action in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. Before getting sacked for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster," Power took to calling herself "genocide chick," hardly the moniker of a Morgenthau realist.

Obama's writings and speeches reflect these attitudes. His key foreign-policy article, "Renewing American Leadership," opens by acknowledging that now more than ever "the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders." Bush made the same point in his second inaugural address, declaring, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." In a series of foreign-policy speeches last year, Obama managed to out-freedom Bush, arguing that the United States must export economic opportunity as well as democracy to "dry up the rising well of support for extremism." Speaking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Obama explicitly agreed with Bush's view that "America's larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom-that it is the yearning of all who live in the shadow of tyranny and despair." But, he added, "this yearning is not satisfied by simply deposing a dictator and setting up a ballot box." The "true desire of mankind," Obama declared, was to live in "dignity and opportunity," with sufficient food, water, shelter, education and health care to sustain "security and simple justice." In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Obama went even further, describing the "desperate faces" he so often saw looking up at his helicopter in places like Darfur, Djibouti and Baghdad. The task of American foreign policy, he argued, was to change how those desperate faces saw America. "We can hold true to our values, and in doing so advance those values abroad," Obama declared. "And we can be what that child looking up at a helicopter needs us to be: the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world." It was vintage Bush, suffused with the same ambitions for American moral leadership and the same belief that freedom builds the surest road to peace.

Essay Types: First Draft of History