"I think you have to ask yourself if you are better off in a situation in which extremists, Islamists and others, get to hide behind their masks and operate on the fringes of the political system, or would you rather have an open political system in which people actually have to contest for the will of the people," she now says.

"And who does best in a contest for the will of the people?" she goes on. "To a certain extent, you have to trust these values, and you have top believe that while democracy is very hard -- it is certainly not an easy system to bring into being -- I would have two answers; first, it's certainly better than anything else we can cling to; and secondly, what's the alternative?"

Rice's beliefs emerge in the course of a long and thoughtful interview published in the first edition of a new quarterly journal The American Interest that was founded by a group of academics and policy thinkers more or less dismayed by the conduct and course of U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration, while not being associated with the liberal-left.

They are led by Zbigniew Bzrezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Francis Fukuyama, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The End of History," and Professor Samuel Huntington, author of "The Coming Clash of Civilizations." Most of the group is politically centrist or moderately conservative, and veterans of the policy wars and ideological debates that took place on the journal The National Interest, whose former editor Adam Garfinkle is editor of the new publication.

The intellectual tussles of recent years between neo-conservatives and realists, and the further arguments between liberal and conservative internationalists and between neo-isolationists of both liberal and conservative hues, have been most unusual, and testify to the revolutionary and transforming nature of the Bush administration's foreign policy in response to 9/11. So it was fitting that the new journal The American Interest was launched at this week's highly successful two-day conference in Washington on "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose." The founding statement of the new journal insists "American statecraft is not simply about power but also purpose."

The Bush administration has sought to answer that; America's purpose is to spread democracy. That was the commitment of President Bush's second inaugural address, and Rice in her interview emphasizes his address "will stand as one of the most important statements of American policy of many, many years."

But as the contributors to an American Interest symposium in the new issue point out, that will depend on whether future presidents and future majorities in Congress sustain the Bush Doctrine of the second Inaugural, that: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

The durability of the Bush Doctrine is likely to hinge on the success or failure of the venture in Iraq, to turn the military victory of 2003 into a political victory before the next presidential election in 2008, and to do so while winning -- or at least not losing -- the most determined and bloody insurgency campaign American arms have confronted since Vietnam. This is a tall order, given the erosion of Bush's opinion poll support and the strains on the U.S. military and the failures of American diplomacy to secure a broad consensus of support and assistance in Iraq from America's allies. And on top of all that comes the further crisis from the fallout of Hurricane Katrina. The American government can rarely focus thoroughly on more than one major challenge at once, and the presidential time and energy that had been devoted to Iraq must now be shared with the burdens that attend the devastation of America's Gulf Coast.

In this first issue of The American interest, Fukuyama makes the powerful point that already, the Iraq war has distracted presidential attention from the looming new challenges of China's rise and the creeping transformation of the Asian security scene, and the growing threat of a neo-socialist challenge from Latin America, led by the oil-rich Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But that is only the beginning.

"In the longer run, the greatest challenge faced by liberal democracies will not, in my view, be an external one such as defending themselves from international terrorism or managing a return to great power rivalry, but the internal problem of integrating culturally diverse populations into a single, cohesive national community," Fukuyama writes. "In this respect, I am much more optimistic about America's long-term prospects than those of Europe."

But that is where the broader aspect of the Bush Doctrine of democracy comes in, because it is not easy to see how a healthy, open and pluralist national community can emerge without democracy. As Rice stressed in her interview in the new journal: "Democracy is not just elections. Democracy is, in fact, also the creation of liberal institutions, the strengthening of civil society, and most of our democracy programs are aimed at both those elements. It's later in the process that you get into democracy assistance."

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