President George W. Bush has vowed to spread freedom, democracy and free enterprise across the globe, especially the Muslim world, and strike pre-emptively at the perceived enemies of the United States.
His policy, set out in a sweeping national security strategy statement last week, could provoke more than one "regime change" in the Middle East, if applied consistently to friend and foe.
Few analysts believe it will be. The US administration has already pledged to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, citing his alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and his oppression of his own people.
It has not yet directly threatened the governments of Iran, Syria and Libya with military action, though they are all fixtures on the US list of states sponsoring terrorism.
However, with the partial exception of Turkey, Washington's closest Muslim allies - Saudi Arabia, Egypt and nuclear-armed Pakistan - are hardly models of democracy and human rights, while all three have spawned anti-Western Islamic extremists.
Ali Ansari, an Iranian academic at Durham University, said he doubted the United States would abandon its traditional friends and risk destabilising the entire Middle East.
"What the Americans are doing is exporting their revolution, just like Iran did in the 1980s," he said of the new US policy document. "But there is no way the Americans will tolerate the House of Saud's collapse or stop pumping money into Egypt."
When Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked how the new strategy, which picks out the Muslim world as ripe for the promotion of "moderate and modern" government, would apply to Saudi Arabia and Syria, she replied cautiously.
In a weekend interview with London's Financial Times, she named only Arab lightweights Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan as countries where "reformist elements" deserved US support.
She said nothing of Iran, lumped by Bush into an "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea, and where reformers have challenged conservatives at the ballot box and elsewhere.
Without mentioning Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's accumulation of sweeping powers, Rice gave him high marks for arguing that extremism was incompatible with modernity.
The United States regards Pakistan as a key ally in its "war on terrorism" and expediency may thus explain its gentle treatment of Musharraf and other non-democratic rulers perceived as serving US interests in the Muslim world and beyond.
Yet the new strategy appears to sharpen the contradictions between the idealist and pragmatist strands of US policy.
"Are we to understand that the old bargain of oil for tolerance of tyrants is over? And that the new game is US missionary zeal?" asked Rosemary Hollis, head of the Middle East Programme at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Some US rightwingers have indeed questioned Washington's firm alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which between them produced many of the suicide hijackers who killed about 3,000 people in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Ansari said there was great sympathy in Iran for American ideals, but deep scepticism about the Bush administration's sincerity in promoting them. "Many Iranians believe in the American dream - but they recognise it's a dream," he said.
Many Arabs take a far darker view of any US campaign to spread democracy and what might happen if it succeeded.
"Under democracy the Americans will be booted out of the Middle East," said a senior Arab official. "Arab governments are imposing them on their people, who have to put up with them."
A US-based Syrian academic said US support for Israel undermined any genuine drive for democracy in the region.
"Bush, one more time, is missing the point," said Murhaf Jouejati of Washington's Middle East Institute. "It is the actions of the United States, directly or indirectly, that help to prop up unpopular regimes in the Middle East.
"The way to go after them is to go after peace in the Middle East so that the middle classes would be empowered to have democratic societies, but an atmosphere of war and (Israeli) occupation makes it easy for the old guard to delay reform."
He said Syria's rulers justified their clampdown on freedom by the threat from Israel and its repression of Palestinians.
Bush's strategy, and Rice's interview in particular, have had a hostile reception from some in the Arab world.
"We do not need lessons from anyone," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said when asked about Rice's remarks.
One Gulf daily blasted Rice for considering herself "a queen of the Muslim world, deciding what its fate should be", while others saw her remarks as heralding a "crusade" against Islam.
Jouejati said Arabs interpreted Bush's commitment to wage a battle of ideas for the future of the Muslim world as a desire to reinterpret Arab political culture, Islam and even the Koran.
"The message is not received well at all. Its intended recipients are the middle classes, but the words are used by Islamic extremists to say that the America that supports, finances and arms Israel to occupy us, is the same America that is trying to impose its ideas on us, and telling us that if it doesn't like our ideas it will use force," he said.