The 2008 election results did not fundamentally change American foreign policy. The real change began a few years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It began with colonels and captains fighting terror on the ground. They found that they could clear a town of the bad guys, but they had little capacity to establish rule of law or quality of life for the people they were trying to help. They quickly realized that the big challenge in this new era is not killing the enemy, it's repairing the zones of chaos where enemies grow and breed.

Their observations produced serious rethinking at the highest levels. On Jan. 18, 2006, Condoleezza Rice delivered a policy address in which she argued that the fundamental threats now come from weak and failed states, not enemy powers.

In this new world, she continued, it is impossible to draw neat lines between security, democratization and development efforts. She called for a transformational diplomacy, in which diplomats would do less negotiating and communique-writing. They'd be out in towns and villages with military colleagues, strengthening local governments and implementing development projects.

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Ms. Rice's themes. "In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century," he said in Washington in July.

Mr. Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world.

The lingua franca in government and think-tank circles, which owes a lot to the lessons of counterinsurgency, employs phrases like "full spectrum operations" to describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns.

Mr. Gates has told West Point cadets that more regime change is unlikely but that they may spend parts of their careers training solders in allied nations. He has called for more spending on the State Department, foreign aid and a revitalized U.S. Information Agency. He's spawned a flow of think-tank reports on how to marry hard and soft pre-emption.

The Bush administration began to implement these ideas, but in small and symbolic ways. President George W. Bush called for a civilian corps to do nation building. A national security directive laid out a framework so different agencies could coordinate foreign reconstruction and stabilization. Progress was slow, but the ideas developed during the second Bush term have taken hold.

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the United States and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summit meetings, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from day-to-day nation-building operations.

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Mr. Gates' language. During his news conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation's foreign policy capacities. He recruited Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and James Jones as national security adviser, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Mr. Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

As Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Mr. Obama's challenge will be to actually implement the change. That would include increasing the size of the State Department, building a civilian corps that can do development in dangerous parts of the world, creating interagency nation-building institutions, helping local reformers build governing capacity in fragile places like Pakistan and the Palestinian territories and exporting American universities while importing more foreign students.

Mr. Obama and his team didn't invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.