The Gulf: Read My Ships

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Communism collapses, America declines. For more than a year, that coupling has expressed the conventional wisdom: a new world is emerging, a post-cold war era driven as never before by economic competition, an order in which other nations, new superpowers like Germany and Japan, will challenge U.S. primacy. At best, the argument runs, an exhausted U.S., nearly bankrupt after 40 years of containing Soviet expansionism, will have to share global leadership in the 21st century.

It may play that way. It may even be likely. But not just yet. The uneven distribution of wealth-producing resources -- the gap between haves and have- nots -- is fueling a regional crisis, a struggle with severe implications for the entire world's standard of living. And only the U.S., most everyone acknowledges, has the capacity to muster the international effort required to stop the power-grab of a vain, amoral crusader like Saddam Hussein. It appears that George Bush has the will and skill to do so.

"Watch and learn," the President said as events unfolded last week -- a boast reminiscent of an earlier bit of Bush self-analysis: "Maybe I'll turn out to be a Teddy Roosevelt."

This is the crisis for which Bush has spent a lifetime preparing, the test he knew would come sometime, the challenge he has always been confident he could meet. Ten years ago, as he was losing the Republican presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan, Bush shucked off his shoes, loosened his tie, grabbed a beer and took a quiet moment to calmly assess the job he coveted. "You work your ass off, get credit for stuff you're barely involved in and none at all for things you've put together behind the scenes. Domestic problems drag you down and nag all the time. You're up in the polls and down and then up again. But sooner or later something major happens, something abroad that only we ((the U.S.)) can do something about. Then you show if you can cut it. If you can't, everything else can be going beautifully and you're probably out of there next time. If you pull it off, a lot else can go wrong and you'll be all right. Because when people hit the ((voting)) booth, well, then they think, 'Hey, when the chips are down, this guy can defend us and what we stand for, and that's what it's all about.' I know I can handle the foreign policy side. On that, at least, our campaign slogan hits it. I really would be a President we don't have to train."

Eight years later, Bush still saw foreign policy as his ticket to the White House and the true measure of presidential achievement. After Michael Dukakis' rousing performance at the 1988 Democratic Convention, Bush was down 17 points in the polls. A rash of silly sloganeering and low blows ensued (remember the Pledge of Allegiance and Willie Horton?), but the road back followed a carefully detailed game plan and always returned to attacking Dukakis as ill equipped to manage America's world role. Whenever complicated domestic questions threatened to confuse the message, Bush heeded his handlers' advice and pushed his central theme. "The single most important job of the President," he reminded audiences time and again, "is the national security of the United States."