The rhetoric of the Democratic candidates on foreign policy is by now predictable. George W. Bush squandered our good will abroad and the unity at home in the aftermath of September 11--sacrificing our constitutional freedoms for political expediency, and ignoring necessary multilateral consensus about military action.

We are lectured that he took America's eye off Osama bin Laden and the Afghan occupation by unnecessarily waging a preemptive and unilateral war in Iraq--perhaps the "worst" blunder in our history. Now we are isolated in the world, without many allies and with fewer friends. Meanwhile, the United States is mired in an economic crisis, as we've lost our competitive edge abroad and suffer from budget deficits, trade imbalances, huge aggregate foreign debt, and a plunging dollar. Such gloom is the general complaint we hear from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barrack Obama, and Ron Paul in the primary campaigning.

But how accurate are those allegations, and what is left out of the critique? Recent polls in the Middle East suggest that bin Laden's popularity has plummeted. So has Islamic support for the general tactic of suicide-bombing. We've not experienced another September 11-like attack.

More importantly, thousands of al Qaeda operatives and leaders have been killed off in Iraq. Millions of Sunni Iraqis have tired of al Qaeda's barbarism. With the world looking on, former insurgents in Anbar Province have chosen to join infidel Americans to expel these Islamic terrorists from their midst. Violence in the Iraq war is now at a four-year low, and Gen. Petraeus's successful strategy of counter-insurgency has ensured that Iraq is fading as a contentious campaign issue, while making him a national hero.

Afghanistan needs more investment and additional troops to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban. But a primary culprit here is our NATO allies, who for a variety of reasons, seem incapable of sending either sizable contingents or allowing their soldiers rules of engagement that might defeat the enemy. But most importantly, the emergence of a terrorist-free Afghanistan is nearly impossible as long as there is a neighboring open sanctuary for terrorists in nearby Islamist and nuclear Pakistan. In this regard, there are no easy choices, as evidenced by the rather lunatic calls of Gov. Bill Richardson to demand Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf step down in favor of a democratic caretaker government, or Sen. Barrack Obama's suggestion--seconded by former Governor Mike Huckabee--that we might have to invade Pakistan to get bin Laden.

In truth, American options have been limited for a decade, once the Pakistani intelligence services chose to prop up the Taliban to use Afghanistan for their own strategic advantage against Indian interests in Kashmir, and A.Q. Khan exploded a nuclear device--both events drawing not much notice at the time from the administration of Bill Clinton.

Our current alternatives in Pakistan are theocratic jihadists, autocratic generals, and corrupt democratic reformers, whose collective differences do not always supersede a shared hostility to the United States, nor common national pride in the world's first Islamic bomb. Any Democratic candidate is welcome to offer some guidance here, but none so far have transcended the usual anti-Bush sound bites.

The success of Gen. Petraeus and the Anbar awakening in Iraq have likewise confused the Democratic candidates. When Gen. Petraeus was grilled in September by Sen. Hillary Clinton, she declared that his testimony required a suspension of disbelief to appear credible, and Moveon.org ran an ad in the New York Times attacking "General Betray Us." Conventional wisdom suggested that the January and February primaries would be referenda on the war--to the advantage of born-again anti-war Democrats.

But when an American victory suddenly appeared possible, most were reduced to silence, or feebly extending their once rigid timetables for mandatory withdrawal of American troops. Sen. Joe Biden's mantra about trisecting Iraq is now conveniently shelved. Given the cessation in violence, there is a growing realization that the last thing the Middle East needs is an Iranian Shiite protectorate in the south, a rump Sunni terrorist enclave subsidized by Saudi Arabia, and a landlocked Kurdistan subject to perennial Turkish invasion--all in a state of perpetual warring.

It is now a staple of Democratic politics to suggest the war in Iraq has only made things worse in the Middle East and empowered Iran. But again, these are the rehashed attacks of 2006, long ago overtaken by rapidly changing events on the ground. Theocratic Iran is in economic straits, and the cause of a Western and Sunni Arab alliance both to curtail its terrorist ganglia and prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

As for American stature abroad, Germany and France under the Merkel and Sarkozy governments, along with Eastern European states, have never been more friendly. The European Union is increasingly looking to American partnership to thwart Islamic terrorists, and scared of a new bellicosity in neo-Czarist Russia, as well as being in range of Iranian missiles. Few Democratic candidates seem to grasp that George Bush's decisiveness may have been as privately welcome to skittish European diplomats as his swagger was publicly caricatured by the European street. What scares Europeans is the idea of an America reduced to an equal among equals, one that either outsources to impotent European states responsibilities from stopping genocide in Darfur to containing Iran, or hides entirely behind the timidity of the United Nations while crises heighten.

The Republican candidates, so far, have not distanced their policies far from those of President Bush, but they have also not defended in any meaningful way our present course, or even praised our clear successes. That schizophrenia is perhaps understandable given the President's current 35% approval rating and the beating he has suffered in the media the last five years.

But even the most overt supporters of the war find ways to credit themselves at the expense of the Bush administration. Iraq is discussed by Sen. John McCain in terms largely of a successful surge brought about by his own opposition to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is much truth to McCain's critiques of the problem-plagued American occupation, and much to admire in his principled advocacy of Gen. Petraeus. But left unsaid is that the Iraqi insurgents were severely weakened by American forces prior to 2007, and that McCain and others were not calling just for the present 30,000-man surge, but in late 2004 an escalation approaching an additional 100,000 troops that might well have led to greater Iraqi dependency and an unwelcome higher American profile.

Almost no Republican talks of the positive ripple effects of Iraq or current American successes in curbing nuclear proliferation. Lebanon is free of Syrian troops. Libya is restoring normal relations with the United States, after giving up its weapons of mass destruction program, most likely due to Muammar al-Gaddafi's fear of meeting a fate similar to that of Saddam Hussein. The National Intelligence Estimate of Iran's nuclear status was no doubt flawed, but it suggested nonetheless that Teheran may have postponed its efforts at nuclear weapons acquisition not long after the fall of Saddam Hussein. If true, Republican candidates could have pointed out that when Bill Clinton left office, it was thought that belligerents like Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea all had ongoing nuclear weapons programs--and there is some reason to believe that today all four do not.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee terms the Bush foreign policy "arrogant" and, yet, like Barrack Obama, considers unilaterally invading Pakistan to find Osama Bin Laden. Once again Bush is in the awkward position of being criticized as too unilateral, too preemptive and too arrogant in his foreign relations by candidates who wish to invade nuclear nations or remove their leaders by American fiat.

Barrack Obama's serial call for a fuzzy notion of "change" is now the mantra of the 2008 race, perhaps in the way Gary Hart once vaguely called for "new ideas" in the 1984 primary election. In terms of foreign policy, such change apparently distills to separation from George Bush's perceived unpopularity abroad. But as in 1984, we might ask, "Where's the beef?" of specific proposals and policies?

Both Democrats and Republicans should be wary lest events on the ground--as the turnabout in Iraq should have taught them--make stale critiques of the first three years of the Iraqi war now irrelevant. In any case, no candidate has laid out a better plan by which we might improve relations with friendly India, Sarkozy's France or Merkel's Germany, stop the proliferation of WMD, turn around Iraq, isolate Iran, keep an Islamic Pakistan intact and still open to elections, warm-up to Putin's Russia, or achieve peace in Israel and the West Bank.

Where, then, do we stand? Americans have spent more than they took in during the last decade-- on themselves at home, paying for imported energy, and in subsidizing globalization and conducting military operations abroad. A weak dollar, deficits of all sorts, and mounting aggregate debts, if not addressed, will eventually mean either a reduced military presence abroad, a reduction in our global commitments, or a fall in our standard of living--or all three combined. Yet our present dilemma does not just reflect profligacy, but also, in the post September 11 world, the costly necessity of confronting existential enemies within the radical Islamic world.

In that regard, financial belt-tightening, wiser use of resources abroad, and a comprehensive energy policy that reduces costly importation of foreign oil, can restore unquestioned primacy. Meanwhile our ascendant rivals face existential dangers that we scarcely mention. Europe and Japan face demographic time bombs and are relatively unarmed in dangerous neighborhoods. Russia's new global clout is Potemkin-like, in which the veneer of $100-a barrel hides massive corruption, violence, and inefficiency in the Russia economy. China is not as wealthy as we once thought, and its environmental desecration, lack of infrastructure, and rising tension among classes will require better government than it has and all the money that it makes.

The present foreign policy is caricatured by Democrats and scarcely championed by wary Republicans. Yet no candidate has offered anything much different. To the degree that the United States is in crisis, there are remedies that draw on traditional American strengths--unlike our rivals who face far greater innate problems than do we.

   
BONUS:  A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Victor Davis Hanson)
Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present.

Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato.


BONUS: The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's (Heather MacDonald, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steven Malanga)
Heather MacDonald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass, and how the Mexican government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts state and local attempts to resist it. Steven Malanga shows how, despite much argument to the contrary, Hispanic immigrants produce a net cost to the American economy, not a net benefit, and he goes on to outline the kind of immigration policy that would be both liberal and in America's interest. Victor Davis Hanson writes about his own experience growing up in California's farm country and watching the Hispanic immigrant influx transform his state for the worse. The Immigration Solution proposes the same kind of policy in place in other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the basis of what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them.