What on earth has happened to the Bush administration? With only a few weeks remaining, has President Bush found his closet-liberal self?

He seems to be abandoning his neo-conservative foreign-policy principles. His administration is proposing to engage several of his black-dog adversaries, jettisoning its steadfast policy of isolation.

Consider Iran. Speaking to reporters last year, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice uttered the standard Bush administration mantra:

“Look, what do we face with Iran? We clearly face a country that is pursuing policies in an assertive way that are contrary to the interests of the United States. We are pursuing a diplomatic path to isolate Iran for that kind of behavior.”

Isolate, isolate, isolate. That was the Bush policy for every antagonist — North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Burma. In Iran, administration hardliners held the fantasy that isolation would, in time, actually cause the Islamic regime to collapse. But those hardliners gradually left government, leaving genuine Republican moderates in their places. And as the clock winds down, they are trying to leave their imprint. The most significant turnabout began this fall.

Word leaked out that the administration planned to open an independent interest section in Tehran, replacing the one the U.S. now operates in the Swiss embassy. That would significantly raise the level of relations — for the first time since the United States broke ties with Iran during the hostage crisis in 1979. The interest section (a “baby” embassy) would even provide a consular section that issues U.S. visas for Iranians. Bush made the decision to open it “in principle,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week.

But Bush has not entirely lost himself.

After the plan leaked out, the administration dreamed up an explanation that sounded less promiscuous. Speaking to reporters Rice said: “It is awfully important that it be understood that the constituency here is not the Iranian regime, but the Iranian people,” making it easier for Iranians to get U.S. visas.

But then she acknowledged that time had run out. “At this late moment,” she said last week, “I think it is probably better that this decision be left to the next administration.”

Still, the progressive behavior doesn’t stop in Iran. This fall, the White House also proposed to open talks with the Taliban, as part of an effort to reduce the violence in Afghanistan. Here, the government offered a different sort of fig leaf. They said they would talk only to mid-level officials — not Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s fugitive leader, or his comrades.

Negotiating only with mid-level zealots is about like sticking your hand only partway into the fire. The ten Taliban arrested in Kandahar last week for splashing battery acid in the faces of several young girls — apparently because they had been attending school — were Taliban functionaries who took their orders from mid-level officials.

But then, the war in Afghanistan is heading in only one direction: down a steep hill.

Talking with the Taliban is not likely to worsen things. At present, the Afghan government is trying to find acceptable Taliban to talk to.

The administration’s rapprochement with North Korea — an arm, like Iran, in Bush’s axis of evil — has been more gradual, culminating with its decision to remove the state from Washington’s terrorists list. In October, Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state, actually traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate with North Korean officials — the sort of meeting that Bush strictly forbade earlier in his term.

And then there’s Cuba. Last month’s election showed that the politics of the Cuban-American community have changed. The generation that clung to the hardline policy of the unbroken embargo is passing away, replaced by more pragmatic second and third generations. It has been widely reported that Rice proposed to open an interest section in Havana, too. But Bush resisted, until finally Rice decided that time was running out. Expect this policy to change in Barack Obama’s administration.

It’s really too bad that Bush waited until the sun had almost set before taking up these new initiatives. From his point of view now, improving relations with Iran or Cuba would raise his standing among most Americans — and steal a bit of attention from Obama.

Perhaps Bush backed off because he finds himself wishing Obama well — particularly since he is handing the president-elect the biggest mess since Herbert Hoover left office in 1933.

Maybe he realized that a November or December surprise would not be helpful for the incoming administration — or in the best interests of the nation.

— Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. His e-mail address is brinkley@foreign-matters.com.