What's more, the Obama document argues, the United States has focused too exclusively on the one threat that requires a military response. The effort to defeat "violent extremists," including al Qaeda, is "only one ele­ment of our strategic environment and cannot define America's engagement with the world." The others -- nuclear proliferation, "dependence upon fossil fuels," climate change, pandemic states, failing states -- compel the United States to use a much wider array of instruments, including diplomacy and development. The central phenomenon of our world is not the struggle between freedom and the forces of terror and authoritarianism, as Bush 2002 often implies, but the dynamic of globalization, which creates new threats but also new opportunities: technical innovation, human mobility, the rise of new powers. We live with too much awareness of threat, and too little of opportunity.

The strategy, as both critics and admirers have said, dwells at great length on the home front. "What takes place within our borders," the document states, "will determine our strength and influence beyond them." But this also implies that Americans' security is far more within their own power, and far less subject to Hobbesian forces, than previously thought. Rebuilding the economy will rebuild American strength. So will behaving better: While Obama has expressed far more skepticism than Bush did about America's capacity to forge democracy abroad -- a deep reservation about "the world as it is" -- the NSS asserts that "the most effective way for the United States of America to promote our values is to live them."

The Obama National Security Strategy expresses a faith in rules that is quite alien to the spirit of Bush 2002. The Obama team does stipulate, as Bush had, that "the United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our inter­ests." But the document goes on to state that "we will also seek to adhere to standards that govern the use of force" -- because "[d]oing so strengthens those who act in line with international standards, while isolating and weakening those who do not." The premise is that the limitations imposed by accepting rules, and the international order that lays down such rules, is offset by the legitimacy that comes of such restraint. In its most overtly "Wilsonian" passage, the document describes the international order not only as a source of added legitimacy for American goals but as "an end that we seek in its own right." The president calls for a new era of global institution-building "to modernize the infrastructure for international cooperation in the 21st century."

Of course you can find a lot of Bush 2002 in Obama 2010, and not just the gauzy quotes from Our Leader. The document asserts that the United States "must continue to underwrite global security" and must "maintain our military's conventional superiority." Obama does not propose that the U.S. retreat from its position of global leadership. But you really have to be deaf to tone and texture to conclude, as the current issue of Newsweek does, that "there are far more similarities than differences between the two National Security Strategies." Bush 2002 was a response to 9/11; Obama 2010 is a response to the failure of that response.

This president is as idealistic about a rule-based international order as his predecessor was about promoting democracy. One may be from Locke and the other from Hobbes; but they are both, in their way, from Wilson. Events may prove Obama as naïve in his faith -- as blind to the world as it is -- as they did Bush in his. Those of us who hold out hope for Obama's foreign policy would say that at least he is erring in the right direction.

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