How do you build up democracy in Iraq when it’s falling apart in the United States? Well, that is perhaps an overstatement, but the appearance is father to the fact on most of this planet. Our own prime minister seemed utterly secure until the Auditor General’s report landed on Tuesday. The American President was in fairly good shape until David Kay reported back on Iraqi WMD. John Kerry was a shoe-in for the Democrat leadership until the Drudge Report got its scoop on Thursday.

And at a deeper level, the most basic questions about our political and constitutional orders are now going before the courts, as the "culture wars" between left and right, libertarian and conservative, pull apart what remains of the social consensus that makes parliamentary democracy possible. One cannot help but sense this in the tone of recrimination between Clintonian Democrats and Bushite Republicans south of our border: each viscerally hates almost everything the other stands for, and may be prepared to forget their most fundamental common interests in pursuit of each other’s demise.

But to stay on topic, President Bush’s bold, and so far remarkably successful essay in changing the whole Middle Eastern order, so that it ceases to offer an external threat, has depended upon his own relative political security. He has been able to rely until recently on solid domestic support and trust, and on that was built the world’s perception that American power is irresistible. But now the world sees a President Bush whom it thinks may be, in political terms, mortally wounded.

One of the many immediate repercussions is in Iraq, where the prestige the U.S. requires to force various Iraqi factions into agreement on a way to conduct elections, or even a way to avoid a terrorist-triggered civil war, is ebbing quickly.

The transience of political power in a democratic order is what makes it so attractive in every situation except that of mortal external danger. Faced with a huge post-9/11 threat, and shocked by the events which announced it, the U.S. responded boldly; but with a consensus that is now wearing off. The long-term strategy on which Mr. Bush embarked -- to deal with terrorism’s "root causes" in the ideological turmoil of the Middle East -- is being reviewed in the light of short-term political exigencies, with babies and bathwater swirling about.

Mr. Bush’s sudden decline in support may be more apparent than real. A look into the numbers reveals that while John Kerry may be ahead of him for the moment in polls, the Bush support is more solid and certain. And the Internet convulsion over Mr. Kerry’s alleged sex life this week has undermined his own candidacy. But the primaries have shown one trend clearly: that whoever emerges atop the Democrat ticket, he will be trying to ride the very American pendulum that is now swinging back from internationalism to isolationism, as Americans ask themselves, "What have we got into?"

It is because the Bush administration has succeeded (whether through luck, or action, or some lucky action) in preventing a repeat of the 9/11 massacres, that the American public is beginning to forget why it is fighting abroad. The danger in forgetting is very large -- for as a direct result of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, they may not have found huge stockpiles of "WMD" on location, but have a much better idea of the extent of proliferation elsewhere. Only a very tough-minded and assertive, internationalist U.S. can continue to make progress.

Perhaps the good news in the war on terror is that the other side has no idea how to exploit the chaos of an election year: you have to be familiar with democracy yourself to grasp the possibilities. The bad news is that the first priority of "terror international" through November will be to get rid of Bush -- their most lethal single enemy.

This means the security of the United States and the West depends in the interim on the responsibility of the U.S. Democrat Party. It must have the wisdom to allow domestic politics to end at America’s shores; and it must make clear to the world beyond those shores that, if it wins power, it will be every bit as stalwart and, when necessary, unilateral in defending U.S. interests as the Bush administration has been. If, as in Vietnam, they think they can win, by making sure that the United States loses, then Iraq won’t prove another Vietnam. It will be much worse.

By Tony Blankley
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Boston Globe — the respected, liberal newspaper owned by the New York Times — ran an article last week that Bush critics may wish to read carefully. It is a report on a new book that argues that President Bush has developed and is ably implementing only the third American grand strategy in our history. The author of this book, "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience" (Harvard Press) to be released in March, is John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University. The Boston Globe describes Mr. Gaddis as "the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation’s most eminent diplomatic historians." In other words, this is not some put-up job by an obscure right-wing author. This comes from the pinnacle of the liberal Ivy League academic establishment.

If you hate George W. Bush, you will hate this Boston Globe story because it makes a strong case that Mr. Bush stands in a select category with presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James Monroe (as guided by his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams) in implementing one of only three grand strategies of American foreign policy in our two-century history. As the Globe article describes in an interview with Mr. Gaddis: "Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country’s mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy’s grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries of policy."

According to this analysis, the first grand strategy by Monroe/Adams followed the British invasion of Washington and the burning of the White House in 1814. They responded to that threat by developing a policy of gaining future security through territorial expansion — filling power vacuums with American pioneers before hostile powers could get in. That strategy lasted throughout the 19th and the early 20th centuries, and accounts for our continental size and historic security. FDR’s plans for the post-World War II period were the second grand strategy and gained American security by establishing free markets and self-determination in Europe as a safeguard against future European wars, while creating the United Nations and related agencies to help us manage the rest of the world and contain the Soviets. The end of the Cold War changed that and led, according to Mr. Gaddis, to President Clinton’s assumption that a new grand strategy was not needed because globalization and democratization were inevitable. "Clinton said as much at one point. I think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch," Mr. Gaddis observed.

That brings the professor to George W.Bush, who he describes as undergoing "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V." Clearly, Mr. Gaddis has not been a long-time admirer of Mr. Bush. But he is now. He observes that Mr. Bush "undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his doctrine’s center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded international system that was really nothing more that a snapshot of the configuration of power that existed in 1945."

It is worth noting that John Kerry and the other Democrats’ central criticism of Mr. Bush — the prosaic argument that he should have taken no action without U.N. approval — is rejected by Mr. Gaddis as being a proposed policy that would be constrained by an "outmoded international system." In assessing Mr. Bush’s progress to date, the Boston Globe quotes Mr. Gaddis: "So far the military action in Iraq has produced a modest improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia; and an increasing nervousness on the part of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates. The United States has emerged as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001."

In another recent article, written before the Iraqi war, Mr. Gaddis wrote: "[Bush’s] grand strategy is actually looking toward the culmination of the Wilsonian project of a world safe for Democracy, even in the Middle East. And this long-term dimension of it, it seems to me, goes beyond what we’ve seen in the thinking of more recent administrations. It is more characteristic of the kind of thinking, say, that the Truman administration was doing at the beginning of the Cold War." Is Mr. Bush becoming an historic world leader in the same category as FDR, as the eminent Ivy League professor argues? Or is he just a lying nitwit, as the eminent Democratic Party Chairman and Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe argues? I suspect that as this election year progresses, that may end up being the decisive debate. You can put me on the side of the professor.