STATE OF THE UNION: Command Performance - Brief Article

The State of the Union address was the speech of a commander in chief. The war began and ended it, and the war was the backdrop of the domestic items in the middle. When President Bush and Sen. Kennedy made their friendly little waves to each other, it was not two partisan pols maneuvering for public advantage, or enjoying the faux-bonhomie of the Beltway. The commander-in-chief was confidently greeting a prominent domestic figure; the sense of their relative importance was never in doubt.

Bush committed the country to a long and open-ended war. He warned us of terrorists worldwide, and -- in a crucial addition to his rhetoric - - of hostile states pushing hard for weapons of mass destruction. The headlines focused on the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- but Bush himself was not so restrictive. "States like these [emphasis added] and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil." Don't fret, Syria and Somalia: The club is still open for members. There was more: "Some governments," Bush said, "will be timid in the face of terror. . . . If they do not act, America will." How long will what Bush called "this campaign" last? It "may not be finished on our watch." Bush's watch will last almost three more years, seven

if he is reelected. How much longer than seven years? In his peroration, he called this "a decisive decade." Europe, and Europeanized elites here, are expecting the terror war to wind down. But George W. Bush has signed up for a very long haul, with much expense, and potentially much suffering ahead.

The president proposed a large, and necessary, increase in defense spending (that Cold War word change, whereby the Department of War became the Department of Defense, now, after 9/11, rings true). With guns came butter. In the middle of his speech the 9/10 Bush, the compassionate conservative, reasserted himself, as he made passing references to Head Start, "a quality teacher in every classroom," a patients' bill of rights, Medicare coverage of prescription drugs. He presented a new USA Freedom Corps, a nationally sponsored volunteer group, which takes its inspiration from Bill Clinton and JFK, if not the New Deal. The Freedom Corps is one of those ideas, fine-sounding, that depend entirely on the details; the historic trajectory of such entities is a brief curve from inspiration to pork. Against such an onslaught, Dick Gephardt, giving the Democratic response, was reduced to supplying footnotes; he mentioned campaign-finance reform and made a reference to Enron -- pretty feeble stuff for a party that thinks it won the 2000 election.

Did Bush's peroration commit us to the worldwide revolution of values that Francis Fukuyama thought was happening spontaneously, and that many neoconservative triumphalists have urged us to lead? Parts of it certainly read like that: He spoke of our "great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world towards the values that will bring lasting peace." These are "the non-negotiable demands of human dignity," among which he listed the rule of law, private property, and religious tolerance. But the pursuit of goals should always be governed by prudence. Bush made no mention of oppression in China, a temporarily quiet strategic rival that will be a cause for concern on his, and the next several, watches. He did not descant on the corruption and thuggery of our seeming ally Russia, or on stubborn social customs in our new friend India, which Indian governments, colonial and independent, have struggled to uproot for decades.

The founding text of American foreign-policy realism is the statement of John Quincy Adams, when he was secretary of state: "[America] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Even he declared that we were freedom's well-wishers; this is a rebuke to realpolitik at its most cold-blooded. He said we were the champions only of our own because that's the way the world works. Every nation has to pick its battles. President Bush has picked a big one -- or rather, he has understood that the battle has picked us. It is enough.

COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc.
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