As a purely rhetorical statement, I think Bush’s statement is unexceptional. All three of those countries—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—are without question evil, in the sense that they are oppressive, doing bad things both internally and externally. As a matter of grand strategy, one runs into more difficulty. It is not clear that this is a real alliance, that the United States should have the same policy in dealing with them. At the same time, I think there is something to be said for being unapologetic and calling a spade a spade. It is important for the world to stop and notice that these regimes are thoroughly illiberal, whether democratic or dictatorial.

Beyond the rhetorical effect of the phrase itself, how will the mindset this characterization betrays affect US foreign policy?

I would say the general effect of September has been to put concerns about democratization on the back burner for a while. For the moment the United States is engaged in a classic national security struggle. It is one in which Washington is asking for cooperation from many governments, many of which are not democratic. In the context of this global fight against terrorism, the United States is not going to ask a lot of questions about whether these regimes are democratizing enough. In the short term then, I would say that the issue of democratization has moved a couple steps back in US foreign policy. In a broader sense, however, it is front and center, because it is precisely the dysfunctional political development of the Middle East that has produced this problem in the first place. If one were to think about it even in the medium term, one has to have a strategy relating to political development in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan most obviously, as well as parts of Africa. This is to ensure that these countries do not become either cesspools of terrorism or breeders of certain kinds of ideological hatred of the West and the United States or simply chaotic lands to which terrorists escape. At that level, the issues of democracy and political development return to the center of US foreign policy.