As you might've heard, Time magazine has launched a discussion in print and the blogosphere regarding whether the Bush administration has abandoned its "Cowboy Diplomacy." 

You can find the Time story here, Fred Kaplan in Slate disagrees that there has been any substantial change in the actions of the administration here, while you can find one celebration of Cowboy Diplomacy here. 

Kaplan claims that rumors of the death of Cowboy diplomacy have been greatly exaggerated.  I want to claim that rumors of the birth of Cowboy diplomacy were exaggerated from the start. 

I've done a fair amount of research on this tonight, and I'll assemble the evidence tomorrow and offer it in a lengthy post.  For now I want to ask a series of questions:

Was there ever such a thing as Cowboy diplomacy in the first place?  Or was the foreign policy of the Bush administration rather less "Cowboy" than the media and liberal intelligentsia made it out to be? 

Perhaps there is something Cowboy-ish about a President who is willing to provide leadership and take initiative.  But it seems to me that Bush's foreign policy was never so arrogant and unilateral as the liberal media portrayed it. 

So we may have circumstances similar to the ones I described in the entry on Harvey Cox.  The media invented a certain reality which it invoked and reiterated over and over again, until it became established in their minds.  When they see evidence to the contrary later, they begin to wonder whether there was a change--rather, of course, than wondering whether they misunderstood the phenomenon from the beginning. 

In other words, what they perceive as a change, is really the development of a more nuanced and more correct view of the matter.  It is not the policy that has changed, but merely their perception.  Or more charitably we might say that further evidence has come to light, in Bush's dealings with Iran and North Korea, that Bush always really meant those things he said about using diplomatic pressures first--things they assumed he said but didn't really mean. 

I've spent several hours tonight reviewing Bush speeches, and I'm going to show tomorrow, in some detail, that Bush's foreign policy was never quite so stridently cowboy-ish as it was portrayed to be.  Bush always had a more subtle, balanced, multi-pronged and diplomatic approach than he was given credit for.