Bush's softer global tone

After leading a much more activist and aggressive foreign policy than most observers anticipated when he took office, President Bush is now redirecting American efforts on the world stage into quieter diplomatic channels as he shifts into campaign stance for the November election.

The surprise results of elections in Spain - where voters upset with the handling of last week's devastating terrorist bombings defeated one of President Bush's staunchest European allies in the war in Iraq - will only reaffirm Bush's growing emphasis on conciliation, analysts say.

With the war on terror and conditions in Iraq topping voters' foreign-policy concerns, the White House has no interest in fueling the "with us or against us" image that typified US foreign relations following Sept. 11. Now with major interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Haiti stretching the US military thin, and results still uncertain on overseas fronts the administration has emphasized, the Bush team's focus is on cooperation rather than confrontation with the world - and on getting Iraq in as good a place as possible by November.

A big worry for a president who has built his reputation on steadiness in wartime is "this idea out there that we may have won the war but are losing the peace," says Bruce Jentleson, a former State Department official and now director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University in Durham, N.C. [Editor's note: The original version placed Jentleson at the wrong university.]

The election in Spain of a Socialist leader who pledges to pull troops out of Iraq and wait until there is a United Nations umbrella will inevitably stoke discussion in the US campaign of how the Bush administration chose to fight the Iraq war, Mr. Jentleson says. But he thinks it will also "energize what some would call the belated efforts by the Bush administration to engage the international community broadly - the United Nations, the Europeans, and others - into what has to become a collaborative effort."

Pointing to such cases as North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and Haiti, experts say the foreign-policy trend emanating from the White House is already under way.

Conciliation with Pyongyang over its nuclear aspirations, as demonstrated at multiparty talks last month, is one example of the new diplomatic stance. Others include Iran - the US taking a back seat to the Europeans in tackling Tehran's nuclear power program; a plan for promoting Middle East reform based more on cooperation with other powers than on trumpeting achievements in Iraq; and a hesitant, incremental approach to the Haiti crisis.

All suggest an administration anxious to demonstrate its multilateralist side - and to avoid new entanglements in foreign crises.

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