Bush's place in the pantheon

Transformation is again the dominant motif. His speech to the nation on Sept. 20, 2001, conferred upon him an aura of legitimacy that had eluded him since his formal inaugural address nine months earlier. And the events of 9/11 also wrought an epiphany that has transfigured the very premises of American foreign policy.

Bush campaigned against the policy of nation-building, but has audaciously committed to rebuilding not one but two notoriously intractable nations, Afghanistan and Iraq. Candidate Bush had called for America to be a "humble nation," but President Bush has become a globally derided emblem of American arrogance.

Most dramatically, he and his closest advisers, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have undergone the policy equivalent of a born-again religious conversion. Lifelong realists all, habitually wary of open-ended commitments, critical of rhetorically seductive but impractical goals, and openly contemptuous of the role of idealism in foreign policy, they have embraced an agenda so utopian as to make Woodrow Wilson look like a hard-bitten cynic. They seek nothing less than remaking Iraq in the Western image, thereby changing the political equation of the entire Middle East and beyond. The ultimate goal is not simply to make the world safe for democracy, but to make the entire world democratic.

As the 2002 Bush National Security Strategy document puts it: "We must make use of every tool in our arsenal," to promote in "every corner of the world," the "single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise," and to those ends "the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

To call those goals bold does not do them even minimal justice. The first President Bush often invoked the virtue of prudence. But Bush No. 43 is a plunger. He has placed a huge bet on the political payoff from his social and economic policies, and he is playing for the highest imaginable stakes in the international arena.

So what will be George W. Bush's one sentence in the history books? That he succeeded in rendering big government a timid relic of its former self, in the process consolidating an enduring Republican hegemony? Or that he bankrupted the country in the name of an outmoded laissez-faire ideology, while once again scotching the dream of long-term Republican rule? That he earned the gratitude of people everywhere for putting the entire planet on the path to achieving "freedom, democracy, and free enterprise," or that he committed the fatal sin of hubris and put the United States on the road to enfeeblement and isolation?

Though history is indeed a stern judge, its verdicts are rarely final. Few historical reputations are uncontested, and disagreement about Bush's presidency will persist as long as memory lasts. As Mark Twain once said, it's difference of opinion that makes for a good horse race. Historians understand the sentiment.

• David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan professor of history at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. His most recent book, "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3