It seems relatively clear that the Bush administration in its second term has itself sidelined regime change through preventive war in its foreign policy. In the case of the other two members of the axis of evil, Iran and North Korea, the administration has signaled that it does not intend to use military force to bring about regime change. This is in part a bow to simple reality: U.S. forces are at the moment overstretched by the continuing war in Iraq, and in any event there are no simple options for intervention to stop either the Iranian or the North Korean nuclear program. But beyond operational constraints, the administration seems to have recognized that it paid a huge political price for the Iraq war, and that preventive war cannot be the centerpiece of American strategy. Condoleezza Rice's instincts seem to be closer to Colin Powell's than to Donald Rumsfeld's, and she has far more authority with President Bush. But the ability of the administration to fix the problems it created for itself in its first four years will be limited. Repairing American credibility will not be a matter of better public relations; it will require a new team and new policies.

One of the consequences of a perceived failure in Iraq will be the discrediting of the entire neoconservative agenda and a restoration of the authority of foreign policy realists. Already there are a host of books and articles decrying America's imperial ambition and attacking the notion of trying to remake the world democratically. The backlash against the neoconservative agenda may not end there. Jacksonian conservatives, those red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are the ones fighting and dying in the Middle East, aligned with the neoconservatives in support of the Iraq war. But a perceived failure of the policy may push them back toward a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them in any case.

It would be too bad if this backlash occurred, and the United States went through another cycle of withdrawal like the one after Vietnam. The United States remains too big, wealthy, and influential for it ever to abjure big ambitions in world politics. What is needed is not a return to a narrow realism but rather a realistic Wilsonianism that recognizes the importance to world order of what goes on inside states and that better matches the available tools to the achievement of democratic ends. Such a policy would take seriously the idealistic part of the old neoconservative agenda but take a fresh look at development, international institutions, and a host of issues that conservatives, neo- and paleo-, seldom took seriously.

This means, in the first instance, a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and reemphasis on other types of policy instruments. Preventive war and regime change via military intervention can never be taken off the table completely, but they have to be understood as very extreme measures. It is not enough to say "we can't afford to wait" in dealing with rogue states because we seldom have simple, clean options for using force. The National Security Strategy of the United States ought to be officially revised to provide clear criteria for when we believe preventive war is legitimate, and those criteria ought to be both restrictive and specific.

The rhetoric about World War IV and the global war on terrorism should cease. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win. But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom; whatever the merits of the original intervention, walking away from Iraq now without creating a strong and stable government there will leave a festering terrorist sanctuary in the Sunni triangle. Much of the campaign against jihadist terrorism will be fought out in Western Europe by our allies; we will have little direct role in this struggle since many of the terrorists will be European citizens. Outside of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the anti-jihadist campaign will look more like a police and intelligence operation than a war.

The United States should promote both political and economic development, and it should care about what happens inside states around the world. We should do this by focusing primarily on good governance, political accountability, democracy, and strong institutions. But the primary instruments by which we do this are mostly within the realm of soft power: our ability to set an example, to train and educate, to support with advice and often money.

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