After seven years of cowboy, is it really a good idea for Bush to go soft on foreign policy now?

[Bush] recently told the London Times he regrets the tough guy language he used in the run-up to the Iraq War. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” he said. Is that really the important thing? “Bring them on” wasn’t the most prudent rhetorical choice ever made by a wartime commander in chief, but then George W. Bush wasn’t leading a nation faced with a rhetorical threat. The challenges posed by 9/11 were, and are, actual-not linguistic. It’s what the President did in response that mattered. And some six years after taking the fight to the terrorists, we see al Qaeda’s power structure crumbling and its popular support waning. And we have not suffered another mainland attack. All the cowboy slang ranks as a footnote.

More troubling than Bush’s regrets is his present conception of diplomacy in regard to Iran. It’s as if he’s seeking to redeem himself by instituting a program of American humility. For the touchy-feely internationalists who consider multilateralism itself a goal of U.S. foreign policy, George W. Bush’s meeting in Slovenia yesterday was a triumph. For those who are more concerned about Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear arsenal, the meeting was very worrisome.

Seems to me that Bush won re-election, definitively, over John Kerry and the internationalists while sticking to his “tough guy” language.  Why abandon it now?