George Walker Bush is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"One historian said of FDR that 'details stuck in his mind like sand in honey' - not quite the description one would apply to today's incumbent. Nevertheless, Bush could do worse than read up on his predecessor, and in particular three aspects of Rooseveltian foreign policy.

First, FDR took a realist, not an ideological, approach to international relations. In establishing the United Nations, for example, he eschewed Woodrow Wilson's idealism in favour of a system that recognised great power supremacy.

Second, Roosevelt invested time and prestige in building a reliable domestic foreign policy consensus in favour of involvement in a foreign war. He appointed Republicans to the most senior cabinet posts in order to foster bipartisanship. Crucially, he deferred American entry until the moment was right, when opinion had swung away from isolationism and the surprise attack at Pearl Harbour demonstrated the moral and security imperative of intervention.

This foreshadows the third lesson: FDR knew the value of working with and through other countries to project American power. For two long years, Roosevelt fought the European war by proxy, arming, supplying, but not fighting alongside Allied forces. For the postwar settlement, he designed institutions of global order that gave other nations a voice but ensured American predominance. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, Roosevelt established American hegemony by consent.

FDR intuitively understood the value of so-called "soft power" - the ability to get others to want the outcomes you want - and he deployed it alongside the tanks and aircraft carriers that constituted American hard power. In the prelude to Operation Iraqi Freedom, by contrast, Bush appeared little interested in persuading the world of the righteousness of his cause, a stance he now plainly regrets."