U.S. President George W. Bush’s goodwill tour across Europe last week has been hailed from all quarters as encouraging evidence that his administration is finally serious about repairing America’s damaged relations with the world. Once the war cry of the John Kerry presidential campaign, “rebuilding America’s alliances” is now an official part of the White House’s second-term lexicon.

Yet despite its universal acceptance among foreign policy cognoscenti, the notion that the first term of the Bush administration was an unmitigated disaster for our international alliances is simply untrue.

Granted, the trans-Atlantic relationship has had a stormy transition from the defensive posture of the Cold War to the offensive operations required by the global war on terror.

But this is hardly surprising: Alliances geared toward preserving the status quo are intrinsically easier to manage than those that seek to upturn it.

More importantly, even as Washington and Paris have lobbed spitballs at each other, the web of security commitments the United States has cultivated for the past 50 years has, far from contracting, expanded radically. With the eastward growth of NATO, new relationships with once-hostile states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya, and partnerships with other countries under threat by radical Islam, the U.S. alliance system is transforming in ways the White House itself may not fully appreciate.

Since the Sept. 11, attacks, the United States has been quietly working to develop new and stronger alliances where they matter most: with the governments and societies of the greater Middle East. In essence, just as al-Qaida has been said to “franchise” jihad--outsourcing the grunt work of suicide bombings to angry young locals from Turkey to Indonesia--the Pentagon is building a rival franchise in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, mobilizing and supporting locals willing to join the fight against radical Islam.

Implicit in this strategy is the recognition that, while the global war on terror is a matter of power projection for the United States, it must be understood as a war of defense for the soldiers, policemen, civil servants and ordinary citizens of the greater Middle East--a defense of their homelands against the transnational threat of radical Islam, a defense of their religion against those who would desecrate and pervert it, and most profoundly, a defense of their natural rights and political liberties.

In this struggle, the Bush administration’s approach to alliances since Sept. 11, 2001, derives less from the 19th century tradition of American unilateralism than from Franklin Roosevelt’s conception of the United States as an “arsenal of democracy” in the fight against the Axis. The United States contributes weapons, cash and a modicum of soldiers, but the lion’s share of the fighting and dying is being done by our local allies.

Just as the brunt of defeating Hitler was borne by the Red Army, so will much of the victory in the greater Middle East be due to sacrifices made by Afghans, Iraqis and allies we cannot yet conceive.

To the extent this strategy succeeds, it is also a function of the post-Cold War great power peace that the Bush administration has preserved and, arguably, deepened. Even as critics have deplored Bush’s “with-us-or-against-us” rhetoric as simplistic and alienating, the fact remains that in grand strategic terms, almost the entire planet has chosen to be with us.

Moscow, despite some grumbling, has acceded to U.S. counterterrorism alliances with former satellite states like Georgia; Washington has been able, miraculously, to strengthen its strategic partnerships with archrivals India and Pakistan simultaneously.

Alignment, of course, is not the same thing as popularity, and there’s no question that Bush is disliked by wide swaths of the planet. Yet it is striking that the past four years have, by and large, not witnessed the rise--whether by the ballot box in democratic societies, or popular revolt in autocratic ones--of expressly anti-American regimes.

When governments changed hands under the Bush administration’s watch, the United States has usually been better off with the result (Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, but also Georgia, Ukraine, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Colombia, Kenya and Liberia); only rarely have we been worse off (Spain and South Korea).

With the partial exception of the decision to invade Iraq, popular animosity toward Bush has not translated into active opposition to U.S. strategic priorities, much less alliance with Islamist insurgents. Democratic elections in Muslim countries where anti-American sentiment runs high have done nothing to strengthen al-Qaida; to the contrary, they have weakened it

While the Bush administration has maneuvered countless governments, both traditional allies and historical foes, into its counterterrorism coalition, Osama bin Laden’s organization is more an international pariah today than it was four years ago, utterly bereft of state sponsors.

In addition to deepening alliances in the greater Middle East and facilitating cooperation among the global powers, the Bush administration has also worked to develop effective partnerships for projecting power. The notion that NATO’s future lies in “out-of-Europe” deployments has moved, in the space of a few years, from wishful thinking in Washington to established fact in Kabul and Baghdad.

At the same time, the Bush administration has successfully prevailed upon the Europeans to take more responsibility in their own backyard, freeing up American forces for use elsewhere. Nine years after the Dayton Accords brought NATO to Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, almost all U.S. peacekeepers have departed, transferring command to the European Union.

It should come as no surprise that new conflicts spark new coalitions. What is remarkable is how readily old alliances are being remade in response to entirely new strategic circumstances. They’re far from completely reformed, of course, and the relative importance of the various members is changing. But piece by piece, the creation of the institutions of an extended Pax Americana is well under way.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow and Vance Serchuk is a research associate in defense and security policy studies at AEI.