Guest editorial: Foreign policy

Some will no doubt dismiss his Thursday speech that focused mostly on the Middle East as a way of changing the subject from unfound weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to a more defensible, idealistic objective of securing freedom for the subjugated. The cynics should have their say, but there's reason to believe the president is sincere, and there are grounds for being worried that he is.

Democracies do not come cheap, as the president acknowledged. America comes about as close to getting democracy right as anybody, but many of us would say we still fall short in some respects, and we went through a revolution, an awful, bloody civil war and a series of hard-fought reforms -- some fairly recently -- to get to where we are today.

The president says, quite correctly, that there is nothing inherent in the Muslim faith that is anti-freedom. He is clearly right. He says you can have modernized, democratic governments in societies that remain true to cultural traditions far different from those in the United States. He is right again. But given the absence of certain political traditions, it will be hundreds of times more difficult for some nations to flower democratically than it has been for the United States.

The issue becomes the extent to which the United States will aim to foster democracy. At the least, the president's policy would mean an alteration in the idea that our chief guide in international affairs is our own best interest even when that interest is in conflict with our political values. The United States and other Western nations have propped up oppressive regimes, sometimes with heroic measures, when those regimes have been our military allies or important trading partners. Is that to stop? The next question is whether we should go still further, actively trying to remake nations that are dictatorial.

It can and has been argued that America's long-term interests are best served by unswerving adherence to our ideals. It is far harder to argue that our intervention in dictatorships would be anything more than an enormously costly, endlessly frustrating experience that would ultimately weaken our own democracy. The reality could be that the United States would pick its shots, intervening where that seemed practical and otherwise restricting our democratic enthusiasms to heartfelt sermonizing.

There is ample room for debate here.

The president's newly voiced vision -- which in many respects seems true to less extensive expressions of his views -- may be a great one; there could come a day, decades from now, when people say his speech was the beginning of a great movement that made the world a far better place than had once seemed imaginable.

There could also come a day when people say the speech signaled a failed, treasury-emptying romp of blurry-eyed idealism, or that the cynics were right: It was just a way of covering up mistakes in Iraq.

What we seem to have, though, is an issue of substance, and what is needed are substantive arguments both pro and con.