Bush Is Solving Clinton’s Problems

NEW YORK — When the hottest items at the hardware store are duct tape and gas masks, it’s a pretty good sign that things aren’t going well. And that’s just the beginning of the bad news: War looms in Iraq. The space shuttle explodes. The economy is tanking. North Korea is going nuclear. A rift is said to be growing between the U.S. and Europe. No wonder, in a recent Gallup Poll, 58% of respondents said they were dissatisfied with “the way things are going” -- the highest such total in more than six years.

Kind of makes you yearn for the placid 1990s, doesn’t it? Remember the days when the hottest foreign policy issue was free trade, the dominant academic argument was over whether we’d reached “the end of history” and the stock market seemed only to go up? It’s easy to get nostalgic. But in fact, the 1990s weren’t as rosy as we thought, and the situation today isn’t as bleak.

The first Bush administration and the Clinton administration did achieve some important things, from the victory in the first Gulf War to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but they also papered over a lot of problems that have now come back to haunt us. We face some overwhelming challenges today precisely because so many Americans -- including so many important decision-makers -- tuned out the world in the 1990s.

Consider just a few of the more salient examples: Just as the economy was already heading south by the time the current Bush administration took office, so was the security situation -- although few people saw this at the time. (One exception was two history professors, Donald and Frederick Kagan, who published a prescient book in 2000: “While America Sleeps.”) It took Sept. 11 to bring the magnitude of the dangers home, literally. No one would claim that the Bush administration’s response has been flawless; there have been missteps aplenty. But overall, the president deserves high marks for dealing with the messes left over from the fool’s paradise of the 1990s.

Start with Afghanistan. Yes, U.S. success is incomplete, especially because our forces let Osama bin Laden and other top terrorists slip through their fingers. But think back to fall 2001, when so many pundits spoke so confidently of Afghanistan as the “graveyard of empires.” The U.S. was much more successful than just about anyone expected. The result -- Mullah Mohammed Omar being replaced by Hamid Karzai -- is pretty spectacular, even if more needs to be done to support the fledgling democratic regime.

Taking the war to Al Qaeda has paid off. The U.S. was able to scoop up great batches of documents and prisoners in Afghanistan that have allowed allied intelligence agencies to dismantle part of the terrorist network. This has been coupled with a more active homeland defense effort. More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested around the world. The war is far from over, as Bin Laden’s mocking audiotape makes clear. Another major attack is inevitable. But at least now we’re fighting the terrorists, instead of ignoring them as we did in the 1990s.

The Bush administration is also finally dealing with Saddam Hussein, instead of blithely investing our hopes in continued inspections that never quite work or a coup d’etat that never quite materializes. War with Iraq poses risks, but it’s a safer option than leaving Hussein in power to acquire more weapons.

The looming Iraq war is exacerbating what many see as a U.S.-Europe rift. But in reality, the administration has won support from most of Europe. It’s Paris and Berlin that are isolated, not Washington. From our viewpoint, that’s a good thing. French-German plans to dominate the European Union and turn it into a competitor to our “hyperpower” appear to be as defunct as France’s African empire.

The Bush administration’s major failure so far is in North Korea. The president has vacillated between tough talk (the “axis of evil”) and appeasement (promising not to invade). Neither has worked. North Korea is proceeding with its plans to build nuclear weapons that may wind up being sold to the highest bidder. This is a nightmarish threat.

Our best hope is that the administration will quickly dispatch Hussein and turn its attention to Kim Jong Il. Either continued concessions (another “no nukes for aid” deal) or a tough policy of regime change would be preferable to our current vacillation. The president would help his negotiating position by boosting defense spending more than he’s done so far, to give the Pentagon the ability again to fight two major wars at once if necessary.

Notwithstanding North Korea’s growing threat, and the certainty of another major Al Qaeda attack, there is a good case to be made that the world today is less dangerous than it was two years ago. At least now we have opened our eyes to the threats around us, and we’re trying to do something about them. The era of sleepwalking has ended.