"Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces," Kristol wrote in 2003. "No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary."
Ronald Reagan, who committed the United States to help anti-communist "freedom fighters" in countries from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, often has been described as the most neoconservative president -- until now. Nixon, who was equally anti-communist but who sought diplomatic agreements with communist powers like Russia and China, was the leading realist.
Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, fell squarely into Nixon's realist tradition; when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1990, he sought to slow down the process for the sake of stability, not speed it up. The elder Bush's top foreign policy advisor, Brent Scowcroft, occasionally has been acidly critical of the younger Bush's more adventurous policies; on Friday, Scowcroft refused to comment on Bush's inaugural speech. "He's in enough trouble already," an associate said.
The president has not always been as much of a neocon as his speech Thursday suggested. When he first ran for president in 2000, Rice, then his top foreign policy advisor, wrote an article promising that Bush would pursue a modest, limited foreign policy, and criticized the attempts at democratization and "nation-building" of the Democratic administration of President Clinton.
But after Sept. 11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, Bush was drawn progressively toward the neoconservative view that the only way to stop terrorism in the long run was to bring democracy, first to the Middle East, and in Thursday's speech, to the entire world.
As they drafted the speech this month, White House political aide Karl Rove and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson held a two-hour seminar with a panel of foreign policy scholars, including several leading neocons -- newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University and Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institution -- according to a person who was present.
Another sign of the administration's bent: Several of the leading realists of the first term, notably Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his closest aides, have left. But leading neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz, are staying. And at least one, National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams, is said to be in line for a more prominent job at the State Department or NSC.
