WASHINGTON – What would a second Bush term look like in terms of foreign policy?

This year’s contest is a referendum on both the Iraq war and the foreign policy doctrine evoked so often by the president to explain it.

The Bush Doctrine can be summed up with words from the president’s June 1, 2002, address to the graduating class of West Point. “Our nation’s cause has always been larger than our nation’s defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace – a peace that favors liberty,” he said. He then went on to say that America will defend this peace from both “terrorists and tyrants” and that it will be preserved through strong relations between “great powers.”

Nothing in those words indicate a reckless unilateralism, as the president’s critics have often charged. Nonetheless, embedded in the Bush doctrine is the view that peace or stability can only be achieved through the spread of representative government, not just the flow of economic and technical resources and the brokering of regional conflicts. No more are America’s interests defined as having nothing to do with the composition of governments.

The Bush doctrine marks a departure from the Cold War realpolitik that for decades propped up pro-American authoritarians, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.

President Bush’s re-election would likely be interpreted as a mandate for this doctrine and the war that has defined his presidency. With no political pressure to see his vice president succeed him, the second President Bush would have the opportunity his father lacked to leave a lasting foreign policy legacy.

A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Walter Russell Mead, said in an interview last week, “If they win the election it will be because people want Bush to lead the war on terror. In general they will say they got it right the first time around.” Mr. Mead predicted that the president may make changes around the edges in terms of tactical execution, but not in a meaningful sense in terms of the Bush Doctrine.

A former Bush speech writer, David Frum, told The New York Sun, “If George Bush wins re-election it will be a seismic event in international relations, both for America’s friends and even more for his enemies. Many people around the world have been hoping for a year and a half that the Bush Doctrine would prove an aberration. If he is elected the Bush Doctrine becomes a permanent fact of international life. And everyone from the best fed diplomat in the Quai d’Orsay to the hunted terrorist in the Afghan mountains will have to adjust accordingly.”

In practice, though, the president’s policies have not always matched his bold vision. The distance between the broad Bush vision and his policies is particularly evident with the challenge of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or North Korea’s defiance of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Both regimes were described as two prongs to the axis of evil in the President’s 2002 State of the Union address, the third being Iraq.

But the president has pursued indirect negotiations with Iran, through the Europeans, and negotiations with North Korea in talks that include her neighbors and Russia. Far from devising strategies to end the rule of Iran’s Mullahs or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, the president has pursued a public policy that works with these regimes as they are.

The former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a strong proponent of the Iraq war, Richard Perle, says he believes Iran is “unfinished business” for a second Bush administration.” I hope we will see a more vigorous policy after the election. We’ve been easy on the Iranians. There should be more support for those Iranians who in very large numbers want to change things. They are fed up with a bunch of corrupt mullahs.”

Indeed, the President has on many occasions used the bully pulpit to stand in solidarity with those Iranian democrats. But his National Security Council has not backed up those words with the material support many of his Pentagon analysts have proposed. As a result, senior American officials often say the president lacks a policy for the country the State Department has consistently said is the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism.

On Iran, North Korea, and other challenges, like the reform of Arab governments and the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the shape and depth of the President’s foreign policy will have a lot to do with who he taps to execute it. His first administration is known for often-bitter feuds between his secretary of state, Colin Powell, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on everything from personnel to talking points.

Washington insiders speculate that both men will be gone should the president win re-election. Mr. Powell has said as much in public interviews, while Mr. Rumsfeld has been politically wounded by the recent disclosures on the military’s management of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The president’s trusted national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is also rumored to be eyeing Mr. Powell’s job, creating an intense competition between the various deputies for her job, which is the one top foreign policy position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Leading candidates for Ms. Rice’s job are her deputy, Stephen Hadley; the former ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, who is largely credited with devising the policy that catapulted Iyad Allawi to the Iraqi prime minister position; and the president’s current undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton.

Mr. Bolton is a private critic of negotiations with North Korea and has for the last year and a half pushed a policy to bring Iran’s nuclear treaty violations to the U.N. Security Council. Mr. Blackwill, on the other hand is seen as a foreign policy realist and has taken credit for the American plan to marginalize the favorite Iraqi leader of the Bush administration’s Iraq hawks, Ahmad Chalabi. Mr. Hadley fits less neatly into any ideological camp. Since taking the job as Ms. Rice’s deputy, Mr. Hadley has also stalled any actions to move beyond rhetoric in support of the Iranian democrats and has presided over the policy of dealing with Pyongyang through multilateral negotiations.

A former White House aide told the Sun, “The president will not allow anyone to be his national security adviser that he does not trust. I don’t think Blackwill is in the president’s circle of trust.” And while Mr. Bolton accumulated loyalty points with the president for fighting on his behalf during the Florida recount, he also lacks the kind of relationship this former official says the president will require if Ms. Rice is to be replaced.

The vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, says that many of the president’s critics overemphasize the role of his advisers. “I think the conventional wisdom, which is that he will have a second term that closely mirrors his father’s first term, is totally wrong,” she said. “I think all of those predictions assume the president is an empty vessel who has no ideas of his own on foreign policy and now that one particular idea seems discredited for now, a forward strategy of freedom, there seems to be a bizarre view that although the president says this, the president does not believe it.”

The vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Ted Galen Carpenter, said that there is a chance a second Bush administration would return to what he called “traditional Republican foreign policy.” Mr. Carpenter is a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an organization formed in December of 2003 to curb what its founding document calls “worrisome imperial trends in the Bush Administration’s National Security Strategy.” He said that this policy would more closely resemble the first Bush administration with an emphasis on alliances.

Mr. Carpenter allowed that “the other possibility is that if Bush wins re-election those who have directed his foreign policy would interpret this as a mandate to further their policies.” Mr. Carpenter warns, however, that the president has set very high expectations and this may end up gnawing at Republicans who are weary of long projects of grand design. Should the president end up over promising and failing to curb Iran and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions or further radicalizing the Islamic world leading to the collapse of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, Mr. Carpenter said the president could end up being the “Republican Jimmy Carter.”

Finally, just as the attacks of September 11, 2001, shaped the foreign policy of Mr. Bush’s first term in a way that hardly anyone predicted four years ago, a second term for Mr. Bush might also be shaped by events – like more terrorist attacks on America or the deaths of foreign leaders – that are hard to predict in detail.