The Editor’s Desk

A few years ago—I cannot recall exactly when, but suspect it was 2005, after President Bush won his second term—I was on a plane from Nashville to New York and found myself in a conversation with a middle-aged, somewhat beefy man. He asked what I did; I said I was a journalist. He asked where I worked; I said NEWSWEEK. His eyes lit up. "Hey, you all in the media like to surprise folks, don't you?" I said yes, we did. "Well, I got an idea for you," he replied. "Why don't you put a picture of George Bush on your cover and say, HEY: 'HE'S NOT SATAN'—that would surprise folks."

Overstated, but the man had something of a point. For many reasons—many of them good reasons—much of the country is more than ready to see Bush return to Texas. Whether history vindicates his course, as the president hopes, can be settled only by the passage of time, and thus remains, for now, a matter for speculation. How Bush fares in the long run is interesting and important, but it is a question for the long run.

We had the short run in mind when we asked Fareed Zakaria to assess what Bush has got right in foreign policy. The point was not to be mindlessly provocative or to join in the loyalist Bush argument that the 43rd president is Harry Truman in disguise (to paraphrase Churchill, if Bush is Truman in disguise, it is a very good disguise). It was, rather, to take a nuanced view of what the 43rd president has actually done that his successor might choose to emulate or continue. In theory, liberals—who tend to pride themselves on being more intellectually sophisticated and open to evidence than conservatives—should be very open to such an exercise. Detecting shades of gray in a world dominated by efforts to cast conflicts and questions in black and white requires both common sense and a willingness to engage reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

From correcting course—far too belatedly, but there we are—in Iraq to China, Africa and India, Fareed argues, the Bush foreign policy of 2008 is not the Bush foreign policy of the first term, and we ignore that fact at our peril. Acknowledging the president's many failings and anticipating partisan counterarguments, Fareed writes: "So why offer this corrective? Because we cannot go back to 2001. The next president will inherit the world as it is in 2009. He will have to examine the Bush administration's policies as they stand in January 2009 —not as they were in 2001 or 2002 or 2003—and decide how to accept, modify and alter them. There was a U.S. president who came into office convinced that everything his predecessor had done was feckless, stupid, ill-informed and venal. He rejected and tried to reverse everything that he could, almost as an article of faith. Before he had even examined the policies carefully, he knew that they had to be changed. The base of his party was delighted by his clarity and fighting spirit.

"That president, of course, was George W. Bush. His decision to blindly repudiate anything associated with Bill Clinton is what got us into this mess in the first place. Let's hope that the next president, no matter how much he despises Bush, will take a careful look at his administration's policies, America's interests, and the world beyond and do the right thing for the country and its future."

This is our August double issue; we will be back with a look at the Democratic National Convention and the fall campaign on Aug. 25. Until then, if by chance you have any reaction to this week's cover, let us know on Newsweek.com.