George w. bush's first presidency, devoted to compassionate conservatism and to establishing his own bona fides, lasted less than eight months. On September 11, 2001, he was reborn as a War President. In the upheaval that followed, compassionate conservatism took a back seat to a new, more urgent formulation of the Bush Administration's purpose.

The Bush Doctrine called for offensive operations, including preemptive war, against terrorists and their abetters – more specifically, against the regimes that had sponsored, encouraged, or merely tolerated any “terrorist group of global reach.” Afghanistan, the headquarters of al Qaeda and its patron the Taliban, was the new doctrine's first beneficiary, although the president soon declared Iraq, Iran, and North Korea (to be precise, “states like these, and their terrorist allies”) an “axis of evil” meriting future attention. In his stirring words, the United States would “not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons.”

The administration's preference for offensive operations reflected a long-standing conservative interest in taking the ideological and military fight to our foes. After all, the Reagan Doctrine had not only indicted Soviet Communism as an evil empire but had endeavored to subvert its hold on the satellite countries and, eventually, on its own people. The Bush Administration's focus on the states backing the terrorists implied that “regime change” would be necessary, once again, in order to secure America against its enemies. The policy did not contemplate merely the offending regimes' destruction, however.