The posts by Anne-Marie and John on how George W. Bush has abandoned the war on terrorism for the fight for freedom brings to mind a question:  What matters more, what the White House says or what it does?

Anne-Marie ably points out just how much the president’s rhetoric has changed since mid-2003.  The administration wasn’t beating the drums about “the global democratic revolution” in the run-up to the Iraq War.  As Doug Feith, one of the poster boys for neo-conservatism, told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker on the eve of the war, “Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region?  The answer is no.”  And John is surely right that the White House changed its talking points because Iraq turned out not to have vast caches of weapons of mass destruction.  In contrast, a call to fight for freedom is always hard for Americans to knock.  Just ask John Kerry.

But as Ivo suggested in his original post, the administration hasn’t changed its policies to correspond with its rhetoric.  George W. Bush seemingly agrees.  When his second Inaugural Address triggered talk that he was putting the country on a new course, he called a press conference to say that “my inaugural address reflected the policies of the past four years.” 

Mr. Bush’s supporters—and many of his first-term critics who want to believe he has embraced the cause of democracy—nonetheless insist that something has changed.   They point to the scolding he delivered to Vladimir Putin about Russian de-democratization, and they note to the creation of the State Department Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization to help the “world’s newest democracies make the transition from peace and freedom and a market democracy.” 

Putin’s scolding was gently delivered, however, and oil prices rather than democracy dominated discussions during Crown Prince Abdullah’s recent visit to Crawford.  The White House was restrained in its comments on recent events in Uzbekistan.  Yes, Bush did announce last month that he was requesting $24 million so that the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization can create a new Active Response Corps to “deploy quickly to crisis situations as ‘first responders.’” But some perspective is in order:  Last year Senator Charles Grassley persuaded Congress to appropriate $50 million to build an indoor rain forest in Coralville, Iowa. 

[Full Disclosure:  I lived for twelve years in neighboring Iowa City and would have been delighted to have a local rain forest to visit in, say, January.]

Of course, changing rhetoric while sustaining policies is nothing new in Washington.  Richard Nixon talked of negotiation while he intensified the Vietnam War.  What separates George W. Bush from his predecessors is how often—and how well—he plays this gambit. He did it on climate change with a major speech in June 2001 that granted that global warming was real but declined to do more than study the problem.  In September 2002, he granted his critics’ contention that “weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states”; we are still awaiting his plan to strengthen weak states.  Earlier this week he called the current situation in Darfur "genocide," but said nothing about taking more forceful steps to stop the killing.

So don’t be surprised that President Bush in his second term ignored the NPT Review Conference.  Or that he withdrew the United States from the optional protocol to the Geneva Convention on Consular Relations.  Or that he proposed to cut funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s global democracy fund and the State Department’s global human rights and democracy fund.  Or that he nominated John Bolton to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  Continuity rather than change dominates his presidency.  And when it comes to understanding the Bush administration, the rule is to note what it says but then watch what it does.