Bush strides into age of American dominance

America's swift victory in Iraq and President Bush's increasingly ambitious vision for US foreign policy are together causing a fresh look at an old subject - the Age of the American "empire."

A domestic-oriented president who came into office deriding nation building and advocating a "humble" role for America in the world has been transformed into one of the most interventionist presidents in history. Some of his recent rhetoric is drawing comparisons to Woodrow Wilson, who nearly a century ago set out a gauzy vision for bettering the world through the spread of moral imperatives.

In part the new scrutiny of America's role in the world is the result of the US setting up its tutorial shop in another Islamic country. In part it emanates from vying visions in the State Department and Pentagon of how to use America's unmatched global power.

But the central source of the new focus is the president himself, a man who once ran a baseball team in Texas and who has now become a born-again global crusader - in a way seen only a few times over the course of a century.

"This is one of those defining moments for our country and its role in the world, and it's being overseen by a president who came into office very skeptical about nation building ...," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington. "Supporting freedom everywhere has always been an American principle, but the way one goes about it makes a difference and it's where the debate comes in."

The US's expanding footprint will be on display again Friday as the president sets out on an ambitious overseas trip. He will take in regions where US presidents before him left their mark. In Western Europe, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman undertook what are now recognized, along with postwar Japan, as America's finest legacies of foreign reconstruction. In Eastern Europe and Russia, Bush will follow in the footsteps of John F. Kennedy and especially Ronald Reagan, remembered for his own moral imperative, issued from Berlin to his Soviet counterpart: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

But Bush's most ambitious and riskiest stop will be in Jordan, where he is to convene a summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. He will press for progress in a conflict that has been a place of triumph and a quagmire for many US presidents.

The roots and motivations behind Bush's transformation to global activist, and how the public views the return of an interventionist America, are issues that will gain in relevance as the US pursues a transformation not only of Iraq but of the Middle East. They will also help determine whether Bush faces better prospects than Wilson did with his doomed vision in 1916.

When Bush proclaimed on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier earlier this month that "Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food, and water, and air," it did not sound like the 2000 presidential candidate who criticized contemporary uses of the military to restore civil order to war-torn countries.

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