WASHINGTON – The president next week in his State of the Union address will outline in more detail how he will begin what he has dubbed “the work of generations”: ending tyranny and spreading democracy in the world.

Senior White House officials said anonymously after President Bush’s second inaugural address last week that the speech was not a shift in policy. But other White House officials and sources close to the administration said the new emphasis on using America’s power and influence to aid democratic forces, wherever they are, has reordered the president’s diplomatic priorities.

In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush will “throw down the gauntlet,” a senior staffer who has seen early drafts told the New York Sun yesterday. The president will get into more specifics about the kinds of reforms he expects to see from friends and foes alike, the official said.

In particular, the president is likely to praise the Saudis for their recent decision to allow municipal elections, which would let men elect half of the members of the city and town councils in the royal kingdom. But at the same time, the president will “respectfully say he wants to see more reform from allies like Egypt,” this source said.

Since Thursday, senior White House officials have spun the president’s second inaugural address as a “crystallization” of the existing Bush doctrine, instead of a new path for American foreign policy. Even the president’s father tamped down its impact. “It doesn’t mean instant change in every country – that’s not what he intended,” the first President Bush told White House reporters over the weekend.

And while it is true that the president has previously spoken of his support for the political aspirations of fettered peoples, he also has never been so bold as to declare that America’s policy was “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”

Mr. Bush said this goal was not “primarily the task of arms,” putting the speech’s policy implications into the realm of what experts call soft power, or America’s ability to influence, but not compel, nations to act as it wishes.

In the coming months, for example, American envoys to international institutions will attempt to align themselves with fellow democracies, and not geographical neighbors.

The American ambassador to the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights, Richard Williamson, met with like-minded democracies at the opening of last March’s annual session of the U.N. and persuaded the assembled ambassadors to vote for a resolution supporting the right of people to self-determination.

That resolution marked the first time the “community of democracies,” a group founded in 1999 under the leadership of President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, voted as a caucus in a United Nations committee.

Mr. Williamson said he expected the State Department to push the community of democracies to vote as a group in the U.N. General Assembly. “I think we envision down the road, sooner not later, for this to be an ongoing mechanism for coordinating positions at the United Nations General Assembly,” Mr. Williamson said.

To date, the most powerful caucuses within the U.N. are regional ones, where dictatorships and democracies compete on a level field for membership and chairmanship of the body’s numerous committees.

The State Department is also expected to renew its efforts to pressure the U.N. to create a “democracy fund,” a program whereby mature and wealthier democracies will help fledgling ones, but also opposition movements.

On December 23, Secretary of State Powell sent a letter to Secretary-General Annan asking for him to solicit voluntary donations for the new fund. “We believe this initiative will make a positive contribution to democracy, peace, and development worldwide,” Mr. Powell wrote. Mr. Williamson, who has worked on broaching the idea of the new fund, said it would exclude dictatorial governments.

Finally, the president’s new emphasis on democracy is expected to result in a push from the White House to support increased funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and its sister organizations: the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The Sun reported late last year that the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative is already eyeing funding for Iranian opposition figures willing to accept American aid.

The State Department official that helped negotiate the release of dissident Natan Sharansky from a Soviet Gulag, Mark Palmer, said he heard echoes of President Reagan’s famous evil empire speech last week.

“I think this means we are going to apply to the whole world the same approach Ronald Reagan applied to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which was that we are willing to work with dictators on a host of issues, but central to our policy is a strong determination to help the people living under tyrants to liberate themselves,” Mr. Palmer said.

Mr. Palmer, who authored a book last year that spelled out a diplomatic strategy for toppling the world’s remaining dictators, “Breaking The Real Axis of Evil,” said the correct interpretation of the president’s speech was that America has a new commitment to support foreign dissident movements.

“We have done this sort of thing before, like when we helped the Serbian Otpor movement get rid of Milosevic,” he said.

Nonetheless, the foreign policy implications of the president’s address remain uncertain to some observers. A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter Russell Mead, said, “What Bush was trying to do in the speech is outline the values of foreign policy under his stewardship.” He added that the perceived “walk back” “does not mean we didn’t mean it, but that the world is a complicated place and a statement of values is not going to automatically or simplistically turn into a set of policies.”

An adviser to the president during his 2000 campaign, Richard Perle, said, “If I were a dictator I would start to worry about this. Regimes that mistreat their own people will ultimately mistreat others. The president is going to do what he can to counter them.”