Writing in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagen lavish praise on what they term “the full sweep of the Bush Doctrine,” which was on display during Bush’s recent travels through North Asia:>

It is hard to recall a more forceful statement of American democratic principles on Chinese soil [than President Bush’s speech to students at Tsinghua University], or a more pointed rebuke to the Beijing dictatorship. To find a historical precedent, one must go back to Ronald Reagan’s 1988 speech at Moscow State University. And, of course, Bush’s call for freedom and regime change in China marks a striking shift away from the ‘realist,’ commercialist orthodoxy that has dominated the Republican foreign policy establishment for more than a decade. You wouldn’t have heard this kind of talk from the first Bush administration, and, in truth, you might not have heard it from this administration, either, before September 11.

But September 11 really did change everything. President Bush grasped that our response to the attacks must go beyond simply destroying some terrorist groups, important as that is. He also understood the underlying truth that there’s no substitute for American leadership–a leadership that is willing not just to use our military strength, but also to defend and advance liberal democratic principles.

Having watched Bush’s address to the students at Tsinghua, I can honestly say I was stunned by his candor. I found myself squirming a bit, wondering how the Chinese were going to take Bush’s critiques — cleverly couched though they were in comparative praise for institutionalized freedoms in the U.S. But Kristol and Kagen are correct: the shift away from so-called ‘realist’ politics is a welcomed sign, one that marks a concurrent shift in philosophical attitude away from a weak form of postmodern relativism to a more determined and ideologically infused pragmatism.

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