Mr Blair is far from perfect, but he is a sane voice in the President's ear

As Tony Blair arrives at Camp David today, back home he will be damned yet again as a grotesque hybrid: the bastard love-child of poodle and hawk, an obediently fluffy creature with a nasty, blood-stained beak.

Blair's world vision is, in fact, more subtle. We can understand it best by comparing him to another key political figure with a highly developed intellectual analysis of world affairs: not the headline-grabbing Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schröder, but Binjamin Netanyahu, the Foreign Minister of Israel's new government and a man who might be Prime Minister within the year if Ariel Sharon's corruption scandals continue to corrode his authority. Both Blair and Netanyahu have supporters in the Bush administration – but the routes they recommend are wildly divergent.

Both men belong to recognisable US foreign policy traditions. Blair belongs to the Wilsonian strand, named after Woodrow Wilson, father of the League of Nations and one of the US's most underrated presidents. This school of thought emerged out of the missionary movement at the end of the 19th century – a fact that lingers, however distantly, in references to Blair as an "evangelical". The Wilsonians argue for US power to be used constructively in the world to promote democracy and human rights, and – up until their eclipse with the demise of the League and the beginning of the Second World War – would lobby US diplomats and public opinion, much like Amnesty International today, to make these the determinants of foreign policy.

Blair's seminal 2001 Labour Party conference speech was as pure a statement of Wilsonian philosophy as any since Wilson died. "The critics will say: but how can the world be a community?" he said. "Nations act in their own self-interest. Of course they do. But... our self-interest and our our mutual interests are today inextricably woven together. This is the politics of globalisation."

There is now a tendency to dismiss that speech today as either empty rhetoric or temporary post-11 September madness, but look at Blair's actions since, and they are only comprehensible in light of that speech. His response to the key question "How do we deal with terrorism?" has a number of answers – and his response is very different from that of US Republicans such as Donald Rumsfeld.

Firstly, he believes we must deal with it as multilaterally as possible. With Colin Powell, he has steered Bush into taking the United Nations route, and made this a crusade actually to uphold UN resolutions. He has fought to preserve the Wilsonian spirit of a body through which nations can act together, while he also shows frustration that the UN structures, designed for another age, accord a Security Council veto to the Chinese junta, one of the world's most tyrannical governments.

Secondly, Blair argues that you must have dialogue with your enemies wherever possible. He has been the strongest exponent in the world of resuming the Middle East peace process. Against American advice, he has invited Yasser Arafat to Downing Street, hosted conferences about democratising the Palestinian Authority (over videophone when they were blocked by Ariel Sharon) and seen Amram Mitzna, the peace advocate and the Labour Party leader, during the Israeli election campaign, while snubbing anti-dialogue Likud figures. While Bush dubs Sharon, grotesquely, "a man of peace", Blair has been an advocate of the only possible route to real peace: negotiation on something like the Oslo and Good Friday models.

Thirdly, he argues that the US must build democracies. This is a clear break with the policy of Kissinger and Nixon, of building client states loyal to the US and repressive of their own peoples. Christopher Hitchens, a journalist who is very well-connected in Washington, has reported that there is a growing realisation in US political élites that the client state as a tool of foreign policy is now bankrupt, given that one of the most loyal clients, Saudi Arabia, was precisely the state that bred al-Qa'ida.

Fourthly, Blair agrees that terror movements must be decapitated by arresting or, where this is not possible, killing their leaders and activists and depriving them of bases in friendly nations such as Afghanistan. But he argues that terrorists must be cut off at the knees, too, by dealing with the grievances that fuel terrorism in the long term and provide it with a pool of support. Global poverty breeds terror. This key truth has been expressed most recently by that quintessential Blairite Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, who told the New Statesman this week: "We will never deal with terrorism and other threats to world peace if we do not deal with the hunger and misery and frustration across the developing world."

If we want to understand how heretical and unpoodle-like these Blairite thoughts are, we need only look at the writings of Netanyahu. Bibi might seem like yesterday's man, irrelevant to the current situation, yet his writings and the conferences he assembled in the past two decades on terrorism have been absolutely key to shaping the views of the US right and of many key figures in the Bush administration. Back when he was political attaché to Washington and the US was first getting to grips with international terrorist attacking on its bases sponsored by Libya, Netanyahu was ready to push a developed ideology – and push it he did. George Bush Senr and Donald Rumsfeld, to cite but two, have praised Netanyahu's writings.

Netanyahu has written three books about terrorism, yet in more than 900 pages he does not use the word "poverty" once. Not only does he reject the idea of dealing with root causes; he actually argues that this is "appeasement" and says: "We did not look for the 'root cause' of piracy or Nazism, because some acts are evil in and of themselves, and do not deserve any consideration." In a Wall Street Journal article clearly aimed at Blair, he derided the "apologists for terror" who "say that... the way to stop terror is to redress supposed grievances". In US terms, Bibi is an old-style Kissingerian foreign policy realist.

The key question for the safety of the world is: who does Bush agree with? Just over a year into the war on terror, it still isn't clear. Hopeful Blairites can point to the fact that US foreign aid has been massively increased (although it is still very low on international comparisons), the UN route is being taken (for now) and Afghanistan is a few steps closer to democracy (but still has a long way to go).

These are substantial achievements steering away from Netanyahu. His approach has, after all, been a proven disaster: after two years of flagrant provocation by Sharon, cheered on by Bibi except when he said Sharon wasn't hard-line enough, Israel has never been less secure nor suicide bombers more rife. Netanyahuism pours petrol on smouldering terror; Blairism tries to calm the flames. Blair is far from perfect, but he is the best voice for a sane war on terror. We must all hope that Bush listens to him again today.

johannhari@johanhari.com