Look Who Has a Shot at the Nobel Peace Prize

Toward the end of his latest rhetorical flight into liberal idealism, at the National Defense University last week, George W. Bush called the roll of high-minded American initiatives in the past century: Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Harry Truman's Marshall Plan, the Reagan Doctrine. Three of the four Presidents invoked were Democrats, and the policies cited were spiritually quite the opposite of the Bush Doctrine, at least so far.

They emphasized poverty and economic development over military action. They assumed, perhaps naively, the best about human...