Mike,

Nice pull. I had plucked the word empowerment out of the NSS, and I too put it into the search function on WhiteHouse.Gov while writing my paper. What you've laid out here is very helpful.

A couple of the best examples of what this means for foreign policy are the President's recent speech to the UN on 23 September; from that speech:

“The common thread of progress is the principle that government is accountable to its citizens. And the diversity in this room makes clear -- no one country has all the answers, but all of us must answer to our own people.”

(I would argue that we currently enable many governments to ignore their populaces, and that this more than any factor gets to the roots of GWOT)

And also his clear deliniation between the government of Iran and the people of Iran when he sign the Iran sanctions: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-...-sanctions-act