The traditional scission within international relations of realism contra idealism in the Bush foreign policy appears subverted, if not altogether archaic. If realism may be recapitulated as the maintenance of state power, whilst idealism signifies the distribution of an internal ideological content according to the framework of international relations, in the Bush foreign policy this distinction is obfuscated: insofar as the idealist gesture par excellence of Bushian policy is the syntagm “democracy and freedom”, this syntagm is perceived by both supporters and critics of this policy as a concomitant realist gesture; i.e., democracy and freedom are to be read as metonymic for an American hegemony – in a more euphemistic phraseology, the continued American presence in the world. This hints at two distinct, yet inter-related accounts of Bush’s foreign policy using the realism-idealism division: it either shows the limit of idealism, its Machiavellian reduction towards the “Real” of power; or it demonstrates the inadequacy of the binary in itself. That is, Bush foreign policy reveals a hidden contiguity of the traditional foreign policy split of idealism versus realism; it folds the elements of idealism and realism into each other. Thus, any analysis of the strength and weaknesses of Bush’s foreign policy, its particular contents, seems to infer the possibility that idealist and realist perspectives can co-exist within a singular foreign policy.

If there is something like a theoretical antecedent of the Bushian Weltanschauung, contemporary historiographers tend to cite Samuel Huntington’s text “Clash of Civilizations?” (1993a). In the context of a post-Cold War world, Huntington seeks a new inscription of the geopolitical landscape, a re-orientation of the American position in the world. It is Huntington’s thesis that to continue to think the post-Cold War geopolitics through a Cold War paradigm is a fundamental theoretical misstep.

Thus, it is Huntington’s task to essentially create a new paradigm for U.S. foreign policy, one that better explains international relations within the post-Cold War situation. His thesis is that the re-organized forces of antagonism will lie in cultural and civilization rifts (1993a). The ideological duplicity of the Cold War Period is to be replaced by a multiplicity of civilizations, each civilization’s homogeneity derived from a shared cultural content. This re-distribution of Soviet and American binary tension to conflicts structured as the disparate localization of cultures provides the new map for possible relations within the post- Cold-War world, and consequently the new concerns for an American foreign policy.

Perhaps the significance of Huntington’s text has become aggrandised in the sense with which it seems to anticipate the Bush foreign policy of “war on terror” and the 9-11 attacks. The delineations of the Islamic world and the Western world (amongst other categorizations of reified civilizations) that Huntington makes in his book foreshadow the subsequent hostilities of the early 21st century: the question of the Islamic world has developed as the primary problem of contemporary American foreign policy. Yet how linear is the connection from Huntington’s thesis to a current American world-view?