Despite its attempt to soften criticism of the war, there is no evidence the Bush administration is capable of self-correction.

That came home to me the other day while listening to a senior administration official deliver an off-the-record tour d'horizon of American foreign policy. He is among the best minds in this administration, counted among the ranks of the realists, rather than the neoconservatives.

The United States stands alone as the most powerful nation in the world, the official began. In no previous moment of human history has a single state enjoyed such a dominant position.

When it comes to managing its relations with other would-be powers -- Europe, China, Japan and India -- the United States has done "extraordinarily well,'' he said.

The tensions generated by the war in Iraq have eased, the senior foreign policy official confidently asserted. The Europeans are content to gaze intently inward, he observed, while America strides the globe.

Japan is embracing the United States in a very close relationship that shows no sign of unraveling. Meanwhile the Bush administration has forged a growing partnership with India.

When it comes to China, the administration has chosen the path of accommodation and integration rather than containment of the rising power. He expressed confidence that American power and the prospect of democracy in China will secure the peace.

The only remaining challenge for the United States is to combat the threat of a radical Islamist movement that seeks to acquire weapons of mass destruction. For that, there is the promotion of democracy and American values around the world. After all, the official said with not even a nod to humility, "the U.S. is the most successful country that has ever existed.''

A year or two ago, the American people embraced this vision of a confident colossus, a Gulliver among the Lilliputians. That was before they watched the giant tied down in its attempt to export those American values by force of arms in Iraq.

The arrogance of this administration would be barely tolerable if it were not paired with a stunning incompetence, on display from Kabul to Katrina. That deadly combination has weakened American strength in the world. It has emboldened far more serious challengers in Iran and North Korea, who see the United States as too bogged down in Iraq to credibly threaten them with the use of force.

The war rated barely a mention in the sweeping view offered by the senior administration official, except indirectly. He offered a realist defense of the administration's democracy crusade.

World War II was fought with democratic goals, the official pointed out. And the Cold War -- the model for the current struggle against Islamic extremism -- was not just about balancing the power of the Soviet Union. The wars in Korea and Vietnam were really about determining which system those countries chose, he argued.

Those are curious examples to cite as a defense of the decision to go to war in Iraq. The United States shored up authoritarian regimes in Korea and Vietnam to counter the communist threat. Vietnam was a strategic mistake that took decades to overcome. And democracy came to Korea more than 35 years later, after a long period of economic development.

President Bush cited the democratic transformation of Korea -- along with Taiwan and Japan -- in a recent speech during his trip to Asia. But these are examples of the "conventional story in which you become rich and then you become democrats,'' as the senior official put it so well.

The administration proposes however to skip this long, but necessary, path to democratic capitalism when it comes to the Middle East. The policies of security and stability have failed there and a quicker route to democratic change is called for. But there is no historical evidence to suggest that this is any more than another manifestation of a blind belief in American power.

Democratic values have always been essential to American foreign policy. In practice, however, American administrations have often made painful choices between stability and the promotion of democracy. We saw that too often during the Cold War -- in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 or Tibet in 1959.

The administration might do well to recall the words of candidate Bush, uttered Oct. 11, 2000.

"It really depends on how our nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If we're an arrogant nation they'll resent us,'' Bush said. "But if we are a humble nation, they'll respect us.''

In the old popular song about the rout by Americans at New Orleans during the War of 1812, the British "ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em." Even allowing for patriotic hyperbole, it can hardly be argued that the British extricated themselves with a great deal of dignity, particularly given that another battle in the same war inspired the American national anthem.

The impact of that defeat on the British national psyche is now obscure, but nearly two centuries later, as the Americans and their British allies seek to extricate themselves from Iraq, the story of how a superpower looks for a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict has become a historical genre of sorts. As the pressure to leave Iraq increases, that genre is receiving new and urgent attention.

And in the shadow of the bleak and often horrific news emerging from Iraq nearly every day, historians and political experts are finding at least a wan hope in those imperfect historical analogies. Even in the absence of a sudden and dramatic shift on the battlefield toward a definitive victory, there may still be a slight opening, as narrow as the eye of a needle, for the United States to slip through and leave Iraq in the near future in a way that will not be remembered as a national embarrassment.

Most of the recent parallels do not seem to offer much encouragement for a confounded superpower that wants to save face as it cuts its losses and returns home. Among them are the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.

Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.

The highly qualified optimism of these experts about what may still happen in Iraq - let's call it something just this side of hopelessness - has been born of many factors, including greatly reduced expectations of what might constitute not-defeat there. The United States already appears willing to settle - as if it were in a relationship that had gone sour but cannot quite be resolved by a walk out the door, punctuated with a satisfying slam.

Alongside the dampening of hopes, there has also been a fair amount of historical revisionism regarding the darker tales of conflicts past: a considered sense that if the superpowers had made different decisions, things could have turned out more palatably, and that they still might in Iraq.

Maybe not surprisingly, Vietnam is the focus of some of the most interesting revisionism, including some of it immediately relevant to Iraq, where the intensive effort to train Iraqi security forces to defend their own country closely mirrors the "Vietnamization" program in South Vietnam. If Congress had not voted to kill the financing for South Vietnam and its armed forces in 1975, argues Melvin R. Laird in a heavily read article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Saigon might never have fallen.

"Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975," wrote Mr. Laird, who was President Nixon's defense secretary from 1969 to 1973, when the United States pulled its hundreds of thousands of troops out of Vietnam.

In an interview, Mr. Laird conceded that the American departure from Vietnam was not a pretty sight. "Hell, the pictures of them getting in those helicopters were not good pictures," he said, referring to the chaotic evacuation of the American embassy two years after Vietnamization was complete, and a year after Nixon resigned. But on the basis of his what-if about Vietnam, Mr. Laird does not believe that all is lost in Iraq.

"There is a dignified way out, and I think that's the Iraqization of the forces over there," Mr. Laird said, "and I think we're on the right track on that."

Many analysts have disputed the core of that contention, saying that large swaths of the Iraqi security forces are so inept they may never be capable of defending their country against the insurgents without the American military backing them up. But Mr. Laird is not alone in his revisionist take and its potential application to Iraq.

William Stueck, a history professor at the University of Georgia who has written several books on Korea, calls himself a liberal but says he buys Mr. Laird's basic analysis of what went wrong with Vietnamization.

Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.

But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. "Now, they needed backup" by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.

Of course, there are enormous differences between Iraq and Korea. Korean society was not riven by troublesome factions, as Iraq's is, and the United States was defending an existing government rather than trying to create one from scratch.

Another intriguing if imperfect lesson can be found in Algeria, said Matthew Connelly, a Columbia University historian. There, by March 1962, the French had pulled out after 130 years of occupation.

That long colonial occupation, and the million European settlers who lived there before the bloody exodus, are major differences with Iraq, Mr. Connelly noted. But there were also striking parallels: the insurgency, which styled its cause as an international jihad, broke down in civil war once the French pulled out; the French, for their part, said theirs was a fight to protect Western civilization against radical Islam.

Like President Bush in Iraq, President Charles de Gaulle probably thought he could settle Algeria in his favor by military means, Dr. Connelly said. In the short run, that turned out to be a grave miscalculation, as the occupation crumbled under the insurgency's viciousness.

Over the long run, though, history treated de Gaulle kindly for reversing course and agreeing to withdraw, Mr. Connelly said. "De Gaulle loses the war but he wins in the realm of history: he gave Algeria its independence," he said. "How you frame defeat, that can sometimes give you a victory."

The Americans in Beirut and the Soviets in Afghanistan are seen, even in the long view, as cases of superpowers paying the price of blundering into a political and social morass they did not understand.

For the Soviets, that mistake was compounded when America outfitted Afghan rebels with Stinger missiles capable of taking down helicopters, nullifying a key Soviet military superiority. "I don't think they had a fig leaf of any kind," said Henry Rowen, a fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford who was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1989 to 1991. "They just left."

In Beirut, the Americans entered to protect what they considered a legitimate Christian-led government and ended up, much as in Iraq, in the middle of a multipronged civil conflict. In October 1983, a suicide attack killed 241 American servicemen at a Marines barracks, and four months after that, with Muslim militias advancing, President Ronald Reagan ordered the remaining marines withdrawn to ships off the coast, simply saying their mission had changed. The episode has been cited by Vice President Dick Cheney as an example of a withdrawal that encouraged Arab militants to think the United States is weak.

Today, even as expectations for Iraq keep slipping, some measure of victory can still be declared even in a less-than-perfect outcome, said Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia. For example, he said, an Iraqi government that is authoritarian but not totalitarian might have to do.

The key point, he said, is that under those circumstances, the outcome "doesn't look like a disaster even if it doesn't look good."

On the surface, President Bush's week-long swing through Northeast Asia has been a strong contrast with his recent stormy (and, some say, stumbling) excursion into Latin America.

There was little sign of overt anti-Americanism. And no Asian leader will openly oppose American leadership in the flamboyant manner of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Even prickly China swallowed President Bush's barbs about lack of democratic freedom in China, quietly acknowledging the two powers' differences. In contrast to the meeting of leaders from the Americas, the annual summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Korea will embrace the principles of free trade.

Beneath the polite appearance, however, there is no less a challenge to American leadership in Asia. While Washington fiddled, a powerful momentum has been building up in Asia toward the formation of an East Asian Free Trade Area or, more ambitiously, an East Asian Community, modeled on the European community. Led by China, the East Asian grouping pointedly excludes the United States.

The APEC agenda focuses on an initiative to counter the spread of avian flu and to offer a common push at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong next month to revive the Doha Round of global trade talks. The Bush administration has its own agenda for the APEC meeting: to reposition itself as a leader of economic growth and integration in the region. For this, APEC has the virtue of being a more open organization than those behind the disappointment at the American summit. Its 21 members span the Pacific Rim, bringing together nations from Chile and Mexico to Russia, China and Southeast Asia. But this attention to APEC may be a case of too little, too late. The momentum to give the amorphous APEC an ongoing institutional role, beyond its annual summit meetings, has slowed in recent years. Its pledges for mutual tariff reduction exist almost entirely on paper.

Until this year, the Bush administration barely addressed regional economic issues at APEC. It preferred to use the meetings to promote a post-9/11 security agenda of anti-terrorism. U.S. trade policy has focused more on reaching free trade agreements with a few selected "friends" in that war, such as Singapore and Australia.

Meanwhile a Chinese-sponsored move to hold an East Asian summit offers the most visible expression of a trend of declining American influence in Asia. That meeting will take place in Malaysia in mid-December. The gathering groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Japan, China, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. Pointedly not invited is the United States.

This meeting is an outgrowth of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) process - an annual dialogue of ASEAN with China, South Korea and Japan that began in December 1997 in the midst of the Asian financial crisis. The APT has grown into an elaborate mechanism for cooperation in a range of areas from finance and agriculture to information technology. This reflects an underlying economic reality - the growth of regional and bilateral trade agreements and the rapid rise of intra-Asian trade.

Until fairly recently, foreign trade in East Asia was dominated by trans-Pacific trade with the United States. But the share of Asian exports headed to the U.S. has dropped dramatically, while those destined for other Asian nations has risen. In the two decades from 1981 to 2001, according to economist Edward Lincoln, the share of intra-regional exports has risen from 32 percent to 40 percent, and intra-regional imports from 32 percent to 50 percent.

Much of the growth of regional integration is being driven by China, which is generating enormous demand for imports of raw materials as well as for semi-finished goods that are assembled for export. China has not been hesitant to use this role to expand its influence in the region. It has embraced the APT as a road towards creation of an East Asian community. At the ASEAN summit last year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao declared that such a community was a "long-term strategic choice in the interests of China's development." China has also outmatched the U.S. in negotiating free trade agreements, both bilateral and regional. The most impressive is an FTA deal between China and ASEAN set to take effect in 2010. Beijing even dreams of an Asian currency, based on the Chinese yuan, to rival the dollar and the euro.

China is not the first nation to try for such East Asian economic unity. Back in the days when Japan was riding high as an economic superpower, it too talked of leading an East Asian bloc, based on a yen currency zone. As late as 1997, in response to the Asian financial crisis, Japan proposed the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund, a kind of alternate regional financial system. More recently, both South Korea and Japan offered their own visions of an East Asian community in 2001. And both countries tried to match China in the APT by offering to form free trade agreements with ASEAN.

Japan, however, was never as successful as China is likely to be. "It would seem that Japan is a natural counterweight to China, but Tokyo is generally perceived as reactive and incapable of outflanking Beijing," Brad Glosserman, director of research at the Pacific Forum of CSIS, wrote recently. "Its economic dynamism is no match for that of China."

The United States has never been friendly toward efforts to create an East Asian economic bloc, viewing them as chipping away at the global trading system and rivaling American leadership. But Asia is arguably only following in American footsteps -- witness the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico and the more recent trade pact with Central America.

Many American policymakers believe these developments are partly a product of the failure of the Bush administration to articulate - much less pursue - a strategy to engage East Asia.

"The United States has greater strategic interests in Asia now than it did in Europe before World War I or World War II,'' argued a recent report of the Grand Strategic Choices Working Group, co-chaired by John Hopkin's University's Francis Fukuyama and Princeton's G. John Ikenberry. "Thus," the report continued, "it is unfortunate that part of the problem, in East Asia in particular, is that America's relative lack of interest in tending to the region has caused some allies of the U.S. to doubt our resolve and question the value of resisting unfavorable developments alone."

The report echoes other policymakers in suggesting the U.S. form its own East Asian economic zone with Japan, South Korea and Australia."That's a non-starter,'' says Professor Vinod Aggarwal, director of Berkeley's APEC study center. "Nobody wants to be cut out of the China market."

Privately, Bush administration officials downplay the importance of the East Asian summit in December, pointing to the lack of any concrete agenda. The addition of India, Australia and New Zealand to the invitation list, along with Japan, should effectively counter any Chinese initiative, they believe.

But those countries also fear being left out of whatever may emerge from this process. They cannot afford to be left on the outside, looking in.

Ultimately, neither can the United States. The President's trip is a belated recognition of that fact. But to be more than a momentary gesture, the United States must give East Asia the consistent attention it deserves.