President George W. Bush has demonstrated impressive flexibility in reshaping his approach to foreign policy to deal with the new international challenges brought to the fore by the terrorist attacks.

Before Sept. 11, President Bush embraced a humble mission for the United States in the world. This country, he believed, had to "preserve the peace" by seeking to maintain the basic balance of power between nations. Now, Bush has abandoned the preservation of the old system. Instead, he seeks to change it by promoting liberty, freedom and eventual democracy in countries ruled by autocrats.

In doing so, Bush lines up next to "idealists" or "liberals" such as Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson and Immanuel Kant, and implicitly distances himself from realists focused solely on the balance of power such as Richard Nixon, Thucydides and his own father, the 41st president.

In a second remarkable change, Bush has become a supporter, at least rhetorically, of nation building. Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration derided nation building as a Clinton-era distraction from the more important issues in international politics. Now, Bush has clearly identified the connection between rebuilding the failed state of Afghanistan and American national security interests. If Congress approves his proposals, Bush will be the author of the greatest increase in the American foreign aid budget since John F. Kennedy's presidency.

Third, the Bush administration before Sept. 11 expressed disdain for multilateral institutions. But in his speech this month before the United Nations, Bush outlined an ambitious proposal for revitalizing the United Nations and American cooperation with this most important multilateral institution.

To be credible, President Bush needs to do more to demonstrate his commitment to the promotion of democracy, nation building and multilateralism. Bush must show that he wants to see political reform in Saudi Arabia as well as in Iraq. Words about promoting liberty ring hollow if they apply only to some people.

To show seriousness on nation building, Bush should press for increases in the peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan. Those working to rebuild Afghanistan unanimously complain that the lack of security throughout the country is the No. 1 impediment to their work.

To make credible his pledge to reinvigorate the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the president should complement his pledge to enforce U.N. resolutions on Iraq with a rededication of American participation in other international regimes. Bush could start with the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, an agreement that American officials helped craft.

Because many are suspicious of the president's recent embrace of democracy promotion, nation building and multilateralism, he must demonstrate a sustained commitment to his new foreign policy strategy.

If Bush has shown a willingness to consider new ideas about foreign policy, his critics -- both at home and abroad -- have demonstrated amazing conservatism. In a reversal of positions, those most opposed to Bush's new approach to foreign policy now seek to "preserve the peace" by defending the status quo. The core flaw in this is the assumption that the old international system was working. It was not.

Before Sept. 11, the United Nations had failed to enforce its own resolutions on Iraq. If the "international community" cannot act to execute its will when dealing with such grave issues as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, then it has no credibility on anything.

The international community is ineffective in dealing with despotism, poverty and human rights violations because it seeks to preserve state sovereignty above all else. Fifty years ago, this was a progressive idea, which brought about the end of colonialism. Today, it is a regressive idea, which preserves the sovereignty of dictators who defy international law, denying the sovereignty of their people.

It is odd to hear the international community invoked so often as the defender of high ideals and then see representatives from Iraq in the U.N. General Assembly. Should the United States really be a member of the same organization that includes Saddam Hussein? Eventually, autocracy should go the way of slavery and colonialism as simply unacceptable.

To be effective, the international community and the United States need each other. U.N. Security Council resolutions can only be enforced if the United States helps to enforce them. The United Nations can only assist in the building of new states or prevent the destruction of vulnerable regimes if the United States participates, and vice-versa. The international community has no army and no economy, but even the mighty and rich United States can't afford to remake the world alone. For an effective partnership, change has to come from both sides.

Michael McFaul is an associate professor of political science and Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country; its citizens are perhaps the best educated on the continent. It is the world's sixth-largest producer of oil. Nigeria also has probably the most elaborate system of government in the region. Yet the country teeters perilously close to massive civil upheaval.

In this compelling new work, Suberu examines the profound political contradictions that make up Nigeria, a nation whose leaders have constantly tinkered with a colonial federal legacy that sought to balance the country's three major ethnic groups. He explores the evolution of Nigerian federalism through its various constitutional experiments and administrative redesigns, including those in the periods of military rule.

While acknowledging the genius of Nigerian federalism in trying to subdue ethnic and regional conflict, Suberu expertly analyzes the troubling flaws in a system that breeds corruption, prioritizes distribution over development, and encourages the country's further political fragmentation.

In the book's final chapter, Suberu outlines bold constitutional reforms that seek to promote institutional innovation in Nigerian federalism to keep pace with the country's growing demographic and ethnopolitical complexity.

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nations economic problems. An economic justification for public schoolsequipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplaceoverwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.

Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are downsized, restructured, and outsourced. Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the countrys economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?

This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

This timely study is the first to examine the relationship between competition for energy resources and the propensity for conflict in the Caspian region. Taking the discussion well beyond issues of pipeline politics and the significance of Caspian oil and gas to the global market, the book offers significant new findings concerning the impact of energy wealth on the political life and economies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The contributors, a leading group of scholars and policymakers, explore the differing interests of ruling elites, the political opposition, and minority ethnic and religious groups region-wide.

Placing Caspian development in the broader international relations context, the book assesses the ways in which Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are fighting to protect their interests in the newly independent states and how competition for production contracts and pipeline routes influences regional security. Specific chapters also link regional issues to central questions of international politics and to theoretical debates over the role of energy wealth in political and economic development worldwide. Woven throughout the implications for U.S. policy, giving the book wide appeal to policymakers, corporate executives, energy analysts, and scholars alike.

The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which began in August 1998, is unprecedented-at times involving armies from eight African states. Soldiers from Chad are fighting alongside regiments from Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe in defense of President Laurent Kabila. And on offense, the two main rebel groups, the Congolese Assembly for Democracy (which is known by the acronym RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), are backed by troops from Uganda and Rwanda. As Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, warned the House International Relations Committee in September 1998, "The fighting threatens regional stability, hampers economic progress, endangers the lives of millions of people, perpetuates human rights abuses, and impedes the democratic transformation of Africa's third-largest country." This war, Rice said, is potentially "among the most dangerous conflicts on the globe."

Yet, the war in Congo goes on almost unnoticed outside of Africa. While African heads of state spent much of the last year shuttling across the continent, wrestling with the crisis and searching for a peaceful solution, Congo has been largely missing from the agendas of the Western powers and multilateral organizations. Only in January, when the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, taking advantage of his tenure as Security Council president to draw attention to Africa, did the war enter Western consciousness.

The conflict in the DRC is the first interstate war in sub-Saharan Africa since Uganda invaded Tanzania in 1978, and only the third since 1960. Although Africa is seen as a hotbed of violence and warfare, most conflicts have been intrastate in nature. Norms of sovereignty reinforced by clauses in the charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the constitutions of the various subregional organizations have effectively prevented cross-border conflict from the time of independence until now. The Ugandan and Rwandan-led invasion of Congo, as well as the presence there of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intervention force, therefore represents a watershed in the recent history of African conflict. It appears that the forces preventing cross-border conflict since 1960 have become seriously weakened.

What are the implications of the rise of interstate war in Africa for peace and security on the continent? Why have Western powers been so reluctant to take an active role in resolving Africa's first "world war"? And what impact will the changing nature of warfare in Africa have on U.S. policy and the role of the United Nations there?