THEY SAY THE military is always fighting the last war, but the media are much worse. If you read the press on both sides of the Atlantic you’d think that George Bush was still the evil, idiot Crusader, leading his fundamentalist warriors in a futile charge at ever more elusive windmills of terrorism and tyranny.

The image of reckless disregard for international law and common decency is reinforced by the focus of most of the news coverage — more horror pictures from Abu Ghraib, damning UN reports on Guantanamo, the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens. Somehow, even Mad Dick Cheney spraying buckshot at hapless hunting partners fits the narrative of a shoot-first, avoid-questions-later unilateralism.

I can’t answer for Mr Cheney’s hunting etiquette, but when it comes to aggressive and unilateral US foreign policy, you can forget it. It’s over. It was a wild ride for a couple of years, a genuine revolution in foreign affairs, but it’s gone. The revolution has been aborted. America is back to where it was before Iraq, before 9/11, before Bush v Gore: an upstanding member of the multilateralist diplomatic community, piously mouthing the familiar platitudes of international co-operation and stability.

Mr Bush’s State of the Union address a couple of weeks ago waved the white flag for his bold project of using America’s pre-eminent power to make the world safe for democracy. Sure enough, there was the usual stuff about promoting freedom and not backing down from tough challenges, but you could tell his heart was elsewhere. Where once he promised to rid the world of tyrants, his main objective now apparently is the creation of health savings accounts for American workers.

Iran offers the most powerful evidence of this sea change. This week’s news that the Administration is to channel funds to the Iranian opposition represents not the escalation of tension that some have reported, but a backing away away from confrontation. Well-sourced rumours from the White House in the past week have been absolutely clear. This President has no intention of firmly confronting Iran. He has been quietly assuring visitors that the US can play a long game; gentle diplomatic pressure will eventually work to stop the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons; the language of “all options on the table”, he is reassuring foreign leaders, is mere verbiage.

Indeed, on Iran, Europe’s rhetoric is tougher than the White House’s. The old axis of weasels in Paris and Berlin is now represented by Jacques “Nuke ‘em” Chirac and Angela “Iran is today’s Third Reich” Merkel. The Bush people sound positively apologetic by comparison.

This radically different picture is best illuminated by looking at who makes policy in Mr Bush’s troubled second term. Much has been made of Mr Cheney’s little accident in Texas at the weekend. For those keen to perpetuate the dark myth of American leadership there’s something deeply suspicious that it was 20 hours before the press was notified. But the real significance of the story is that the Vice-President could be out of town for so long, and nobody really knew or cared what he was doing.

This all-powerful eminence grise of the first Bush Administration is now more of a threat to 78-year-old Texan lawyers than he is to tyrants and terrorists. The word out of the White House is that Mr Cheney is much less visible and involved than he was. He no longer shows up as a brooding presence at the President’s elbow. A senior diplomatic source tells me that the Veep has been unusually absent from recent Oval Office sessions with foreign leaders.

At the Pentagon, somebody who looks very much like Donald Rumsfeld is still in charge, but it isn’t really him. It can’t be. He talks differently. At the annual Munich Security Conference this month Rummy was all emollient, sounding like John Kerry, pledging to work for “diplomatic” solutions to the world’s problems.

As the fierce stars of Mr Bush’s first term wane, others of a softer sparkle are in the ascendant. Condoleezza Rice is the brightest. Dr Rice is smart and affable. Above all, she has the President’s ear. Her ideological inclinations were hard to read when she was at the White House, crushed as she was between the grindstones of Cheney-Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.

Now she is her own woman and seems to be the foreign policy pragmatist we knew long ago in the George H. W. Bush Administration when it warned the quivering Russian satellite states not to push too hard for the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Abetted by her, if anything, even smarter deputy, Robert Zoellick, she has helped to establish the State Department’s diplomatic approach as the prime mover in foreign policy. That doesn’t mean that the objectives of policy haven’t changed a bit. The US is, to be fair, more for democracy promotion now than it was. But there’s no real evidence that the goals will be supported by forward-leaning policies.

The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority elections has greatly strengthened the hands of those who have argued for scepticism about a rapid movement to democracy in the Muslim world. With political pressure building for a pullout from Iraq, there is scant interest among conservatives for an assertive foreign policy.

And the strains and contradictions in the democracy policy are getting more evident. Mr Bush and Dr Rice still refuse to believe the worst about Russia under Vladimir Putin, still talk of Moscow as an ally and a friend, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There remains vital work to be done in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the realities of this second Bush term no longer measure up to its rhetoric.

The question is whether history will judge the first few tumultuous years of this Administration to be an aberration in the long span of US foreign policy; or will events force this presidential team or the next to unleash the world from its comfortable moorings and confront the grim challenges of an increasingly dangerous planet?

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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