It is being called George Bush's Come to Jesus moment. As in the midlife realisation that led Mr Bush to give up alcohol and embrace Christianity, the president in his sixth year in the White House has undergone another radical conversion, abandoning an ideological foreign policy for a more pragmatic approach, foreign policy experts say.
Within the space of two weeks, the Bush administration has made dramatic steps towards diplomatic engagement of two countries once shunned as part of the Axis of Evil - agreeing to contacts with Iran and opening the door to recognition of North Korea. In Washington, the shift was seen yesterday as a belated acknowledgement that the administration's approach to the world - on Iraq, nuclear weapons proliferation, and Middle East peace - was not just ineffective, but dangerous.
"The main thing was that there was a sense that American foreign policy was spinning out of control. The administration was looking at one series of failures after another and these were really beginning to damage national security," said James Steinberg, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration and now heads the Lyndon Johnson school of public affairs in Texas.
Others attribute the conversion in part as a product of Mr Bush's stark view of the world. "It is the president's impulse-driven, faith-driven, black-and-white view of the world that enabled the hardline contingent within the administration to pursue the path that it pursued," said David Rothkopf, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who is writing a book about US foreign policy. "It is only the shift in recognition that that approach isn't working that has created very much the equivalent of his Come to Jesus moment when he was 40."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2025025,00.html
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