The Bush administration has passed a milestone in recent weeks. In pursuit of President George W. Bush’s call for the spread of democracy around the world, the administration has explicitly repudiated the realist approach to foreign policy that once dominated the Republican party under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.

The latest sign was the statement by Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, at a news conference in Blackburn on her recent UK visit, that America had abandoned 60 years of trying to “buy stability at the expense of democracy” in the Middle East. The more significant indication was a little-noticed change in the administration’s view of the world, laid out in its new national security strategy last month.