Will Inboden thinks the forthcoming National Security Strategy is going to reveal greater continuities with the Bush administration than Obama’s campaign rhetoric suggested. Not having seen the document myself, I’m not really in a position to weigh in on that judgment, so we’ll just wait and see. But there’s a sense at 30,000 feet in which pretty much all U.S. foreign policy is about shifting emphasis that Inboden might be overlooking.

For one thing, here’s Inboden looking at Obama’s Iraq rhetoric from Saturday’s West Point speech:

[A]fter running his campaign denouncing the Iraq War and doubting the surge, he is now essentially declaring Iraq a victory (“this is what success looks like: an Iraq that provides no safe-haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.”)

On the one hand, yeah. As president, Obama was never going to say that we leave Iraq in a shambles, especially since we’re going to maintain a diplomatic relationship with it. But notice that Obama is saying that the U.S. is leaving Iraq because Iraq is ready to assume the burden, not because (as his predecessor used to say) it’s a long-term ally in the war on terrorism. Nothing in what Obama is saying presumes that the U.S. was wise to invade or occupy Iraq, which is really what he would need to say for Inboden’s point to really carry as much freight as Inboden invests.

It should be clear here that these are differences of degree. But that’s also because the Bush administration’s last two years in office differed significantly from the first six. No more declarations of preemptive war. A shift to a mitigation strategy in Iraq predicated on less-grandiose ambitions for what Iraq would be, culminating in acquiescence to withdrawal terms in the Status of Forces Agreement that apparently surprised the U.S.’s negotiating team. No more pressuring Sunni Arab leaders on a big democratization push when it needed them to assist in a containment strategy for a nuclearizing Iran. An acceptance of a U.S. leadership role for an Israel-Palestinian peace process. Viewed outside of any normative judgment, I think it’s fair to say that Bush’s ambitions in his last two years in office were more consistent with and reflective of traditional U.S. foreign policy.

Not to belabor the point, but this is pretty instructive:

After spending much of his first year in office downplaying if not ignoring democracy and human rights promotion, he is now making democracy and human rights promotion one of the four pillars of his national security strategy.

I don’t quite understand why conservatives have told themselves for years that Obama is disinterested in democracy and human rights promotion. But I think a fair reading of the record, as I’ve written in two pieces now — the most recent of which I see Inboden finds lacking, so fair enough — is that Obama’s “dignity promotion” approach is intended to build demand for meaningful democratic reform, based around provisions of physical and economic security. By contrast, the previous administration’s approach of invading a country, allowing it to plunge into chaos and suggesting to other countries that they were next unless they held some elections didn’t offer the sort of results that build confidence, as still-dictator Hosni Mubarak and still-king Abdullah and still-running-Gaza Hamas and still-”president” Ahmadinejad can testify. It’s more than fair to observe that we haven’t seen any flowering of democracy during the first 18 months of the Obama administration. But if Bush was operating on the supply side of democracy promotion (leader relationships, calling for elections), then dignity promotion looks like it operates on the demand side (constituency building for greater liberties and access to justice).