It was a key and decisive moment for the commander in chief. Outlining his intentions to send American servicemen and women overseas to fight an uncertain war, the President defended his war strategy, arguing that the stakes were not just about one country, but "a big idea."
That idea, argued the President, was a world system based on universal principles and mutually agreed upon rules. A world where "diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind."
At first blush you might think such sentiments were delivered by President Obama, but those lofty lines of world community and shared ideals didn't come from the 44th President, but in fact from the 41st. And while analysts attempt to parse Obama's words in order to assemble a foreign policy doctrine, they'd perhaps be better served by revisiting the vision of a New World Order mapped out by former President George H. W. Bush.
Rarely has a foreign policy been so truly misunderstood as Bush's New World Order doctrine. While most of its detractors tended toward the fantastical - fears of an America subservient to United Nations dictate, sprinkled with paranoid visions of mysterious black helicopters - the actual foreign policy vision expressed by Bush was one of modesty, discretion and fairness. It would be, Bush hoped, a design for the post-Cold War world.
The topic of American "decline" has been a fashionable one of late, but to call the United States a power in decline is a flawed assessment of the global environment. As the last quarter century produced freer markets, fair trade and more democratic regimes, the world witnessed a triumph of American ideals and causes. Whereas the Cold War once presented a kind of global choice, its conclusion created a more competitive market for global leadership.
Thus the end of Soviet Communism presented the American superpower with a dilemma: With no more dragons to slay, what was the rationale for American leadership?
"With the end of the Cold War and the Bush policies in Iraq," says Harvard Prof. Joseph Nye, "the U.S. lost a good deal of soft power." This absence - coupled with the rise of some ambitious global upstarts - has left the world in a sort of scramble for the bullhorn.
But in the New World Order, being the strongest wouldn't require a state to be the most boisterous abroad. With international rules and regulations in place, the more likely actors to suffer from Napoleonic fits of rage would be those states felt put upon or constrained by international law. And when necessary - as with the case of Iraq in 1991 - those states would be met by, as Bush put it, a "collective resistance" of law-abiding nations.
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