LONDON: When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, nine months ago, there were some who believed the priorities of George Bush’s presidency were irrevocably altered.

Up to Sept 11, their argument ran, the Bush administration had been preoccupied with the domestic agenda, headed by populist tax cuts and conservative social initiatives. What mattered were American corporations and American voters. But Sept 11, according to this view, transformed everything for Bush.

Under assault, the US was compelled to engage with the world. One might disapprove of some of its responses and regret some of the president’s language, but the long and winding road from Ground Zero was at least leading America inexorably back into the world.

As complex issue followed complex issue — Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iraq, India-Pakistan or even Europe and Nato — the administration was supposedly learning that the world was interdependent, acknowledging US responsibilities, and accepting that to refract everything through the single prism of the conservative Republican domestic agenda was no longer appropriate.

Nine months on, it is still the conservative domestic agenda, rather than any rediscovered global pragmatism.

Our Washington correspondent reported last week on increasing anxieties within the administration, publicly expressed even by the White House chief of staff, that Bush’s conservative political strategist Karl Rove is capturing control of trade and foreign policy.

The biggest concern in the Bush White House, it seems, is the outcome of the November midterm elections, in which Bush’s party is battling to regain control of the Senate, struggling to hang on to the House of Representatives and, most of all, fighting to retain the governorships of states that will be the major battlegrounds of the 2004 presidential election, not least in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Not so much has changed in America, after all.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.