Bush's global message as a plea to Americans

For Woodrow Wilson, the idealism he espoused led to creation of the visionary but ill-fated League of Nations. In the case of John Kennedy, the lofty view of America's role in the world translated into the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, an attempt to right the northern giant's relations with its southern neighbors.

Each of these projects, successful or not, can be seen as a presidential attempt to confront the traditional isolationism of the American people with the idea that their country must be a beacon to the world for its own good. It is in this vein that some observers are viewing President Bush's "freedom" speech.

The president's wide and idealistic optic on America's role, as laid out in his inaugural address last week, may not be the harbinger of new policies or grand new projects, experts and the president's staff say. Even Mr. Bush's father, the first President Bush, warned over the weekend against reading too much into his son's message, saying it does not portend "arrogance" or a more interventionist foreign policy.

But the president certainly had a reason for focusing his speech on the goal of ending tyranny around the world by extending freedom, observers say.

One view is that Bush was not so much speaking to the world, as some have interpreted the speech, but to the American public. This view sees Bush as essentially arguing against America's isolationist streak by making the link between global liberty and democracy and America's security.

"Again and again, he says America's future lies abroad, especially by tying security at home to freedom abroad," says Thomas Henriksen, a foreign-policy scholar at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif. The president "is essentially casting off America's isolationist tendencies and explaining why we can't go back there."

Although Bush did not mention "Iraq" once, White House aides have since said the speech was in fact all about Iraq as an explainer of why the United States must remain committed there - and indeed throughout the Middle East.

With US public support for the war falling below majority levels, Mr. Henriksen says Bush is offering a reasoning why the US must stick with the Iraq project.

"If [Iraq] doesn't work, it could set off another round of inward-looking, and Bush sees that," he says. The isolationist reflex kicked in after Vietnam and even after the cold war, historians note.

One reason the president may have felt so strongly about making this case to the American people - Bush told White House aides shortly after the election that he wanted his inaugural address to focus on freedom and America's role in spreading it - is that it flows from a philosophical transformation he himself underwent.

"Bush saying we can't just rely on ourselves anymore sounds the same as Roosevelt, but it's a great change for [Bush]," Henriksen says. At the outset of his first term, Bush touted a "humble" US foreign policy and eschewed nation-building of the kind now being pursued in grand scale in Iraq. Bush discarded his old thinking as a result of what he calls the "day of fire" on Sept. 11, when foreign terrorists brought their rage to American shores.

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