US voters have now repudiated those who sought to impose democracy by force abroad. In spite of the gerrymandering of districts, the advantages of incumbency and renewed recourse to the politics of fear, common sense prevailed. George W. Bush is still president. But he is damaged political goods. That is good, because change is desperately needed. The signal feature of this administration has not been merely its incompetence, but its rejection of the principles on which US foreign policy was built after the second world war. The administration’s strategy has been based, instead, upon four ideas: the primacy of force; the preservation of a unipolar order; the unbridled exercise of US power; and the right to initiate preventive war in the absence of immediate threats. The response to the terrorist outrage of September 11 2001 reinforced the hold of all these principles. The notion of an indefinite and unlimited “war on terror” became the fulcrum of US foreign policy. It led to the idea of an “axis of evil” connecting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to theocratic Iran and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. It brought about the justified invasion of Afghanistan, but also the diversion into Iraq. Not least, the idea of the war on terror led to the indefinite imprisonment of alleged enemy combatants without judicial oversight, toleration of torture, “extraordinary rendition” of suspects, the extra-territorial prison at Guantánamo Bay and, by indirect means, the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The remainder of Martin Wolf’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Discussion from our guest economists is free – click ‘Comments’ below.