Bush's foreign policy: Muddling Through

My article,"Muddling Through:The Bush administration has no idea what it's doing," which was published originally in the Business Times of Singapore was posted today on antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com:

American officials, lawmakers, and pundits have been analyzing – over-analyzing is probably the right term – U.S. President George W. Bush's new National Security Strategy (NSS), leading one to conclude that the document that was issued last week has major significance in terms of gaining insights into what kind of approach to world affairs the Bush administration will be pursuing in the last three years of its term.
In a way, it is not surprising that the pundits have been trying to deconstruct the 2006 NSS in order to gain possible insights into the Bushies' foreign policy. Have President Bush and his national security team adopted a more "realistic" orientation? Will the United States attack Iran's nuclear facilities? Will there be more of an effort to apply a multilateral strategy in dealing with international crises? Is China now being regarded as a "threat" by the Americans?
It is very much the same way that the Cold War-era "Kremlinologists" pored over public documents issued by Moscow so as to figure out what the Kremlin bosses were really thinking. The reason for that is that the ideologues who guided Soviet foreign policy focused a lot of their energy on propaganda, not unlike the neoconservatives who have been behind U.S. diplomacy since 9/11 and have confined their public discussion of America's role in the world to bombastic and shallow propaganda about exporting "democracy" to the Middle East and elsewhere.(More)

These were my final thoughts on the topic:

If you accept the notion that the modus operandi of the Bush administration's foreign policy is muddling through, that it really does not have a "National Security Strategy," all the "inconsistencies" suddenly make a lot of sense.
For some, it might sound like bad news. Perhaps we should regard it as good news if we recall that the only time that the Bush administration was not muddling through was when it decided to invade Iraq. It thought that it knew what it was doing. Now it finally recognizes that it does not. And that's progress.