The forced recall of as many as 2,500 Marine reservists for duty in Iraq, many of whom have already done time there – a “back-door draft,” some have called it – is a measure of more than merely the degree to which the military has been overtaxed by the Bush administration’s grandiose foreign policy.

It is part and parcel of what Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, calls the Bush administration’s “superpower fatigue.” That’s a malady marked by weariness at home with the administration’s vainglorious and costly attempts to remake the Middle East and resentment abroad at Washington’s highfalutin’, our-way-or-the-highway style of diplomacy.

“The administration’s bark is minimized,” Fuller writes in National Interest magazine, “and much of the bite is gone.” President Bush signaled as much this week with a somber press conference in which he acknowledged “frustration” with the Iraq war.

Fuller bases his judgment on two major claims: one, that the administration’s “vigor for prosecuting the war on terror is slowing” – a claim that seems dubious at best – and another that, after Iraq, its “zeal for instigating regime change in other countries has visibly waned,” which is undeniably true.

Fuller’s critique is not sponsored by some left-wing, pacifist think tank but by the Washington-based Nixon Center, whose honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger and whose advisory board includes such familiar conservative names as Daniel Pipes, Conrad Black, Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Martin Feldstein – members of the “realist” as opposed to the “neoconservative” wing of the Republican Party.

It’s a damning assessment because foreign policy has long been the GOP’s strong suit and a Democratic weakness. What Fuller is saying on the eve of an important national election is that the administration has made a mess of foreign policy by pursuing a course that has “greatly divided the nation” at home and alienated allies abroad.

“The exhaustion is perhaps most sapping at the domestic level,” Fuller writes, citing continued U.S. casualties in Iraq, soaring deficits, American unpopularity abroad and “a lurking fear that the world is not safer and maybe more dangerous because of Iraq.”

The situation overseas is no better, he believes. Foreigners, including our allies, have never been wholly comfortable with the unipolar world – one superpower – that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They like the old “balance of power” system, which gives lesser nations with global pretentions (France, say, or Germany) a piece of the action.

“The administration now faces widespread international resistance,” he concludes; the world enjoys watching us “twist in the wind in Iraq.”

More damaging, as Fuller sees it, is that the idealism and values America has long been identified with have been tarnished by the Bush administration’s overreach. Globalization has come into question because it is seen as serving narrow U.S. economic interests. Even Washington’s export of democracy is now suspect.

Democracy may be a universal idea, Fuller argues, “but the ideal now becomes transformed into an instrument of U.S. policy. And as a policy tool, the call for democracy has become an instrument to intimidate, pressure or even overthrow regimes that resist the global American project.”

No one’s credibility in this situation has suffered as much as Bush’s, Fuller believes. The American message, however virtuous, has become “fatally tainted by the messenger,” he writes.

“George Bush today could proclaim his support for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate and he would be hooted down in Cairo, Riyadh and Islamabad,” according to Fuller, “because of deep suspicion of any position adopted by the sole superpower.”

That’s a condemnation of elites in Cairo, Riyadh and Islamabad as much as of Bush, but it underscores Fuller’s belief that the global audience today is “more obsessed with the messenger (Bush) than with the message.”

What Fuller seems in the end to be advocating is foreign policy that is, among other things, humbler. But wasn’t that what candidate Bush promised six years ago?