Seldom has a historic turning point received such little notice. By cutting a deal with a charter member of his declared “axis of evil,” President Bush definitively has abandoned the principles he staked out in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The president who once defined America’s purpose as “ending tyranny” is now accommodating the world’s last authentically Stalinist regime. Although Bush still inhabits the White House, the Bush era effectively has ended.

So, too, has the latest in a series of American psychodramas. In the past year or so, the nation’s collective mind-set has shifted, and with that shift have come dramatic changes in the way we see ourselves and the world beyond our borders.

The American preference for packaging history as a sequence of great events directed by great men tends to overlook the role played by mass psychology and by the powerful impulses contained within what we commonly call public opinion. The reality is that when it comes to statecraft, policies devised in Washington frequently express not so much the carefully calculated intentions of the nation’s leaders as the people’s frame of mind.

President Polk, for instance, came into office in 1845 determined to separate California from Mexico. Yet what enabled Polk to convert ambition into action was the concept of Manifest Destiny — the popular conviction that it had become incumbent on Americans to spread freedom westward to the Pacific Ocean. Polk didn’t invent Manifest Destiny and didn’t really control it, but he shrewdly offered this deeply felt urge an outlet, thereby transforming what might otherwise have seemed a naked land-grab into a righteous crusade. The result was the immensely successful Mexican War.

Similarly, in 1898, through war with Spain, the United States acquired an empire, annexing Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. But it was popular fervor for liberating oppressed Cubans, not President McKinley’s hankering for colonies, that convinced millions of Americans that Spain’s continued presence in the Caribbean was simply intolerable. Supplanting Spanish power with American power had become a moral imperative. All McKinley had to do was give his assent, neatly tapping into the prevailing zeitgeist to further his agenda.

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