OPINION: It was business as usual on America's National Public Radio the other afternoon. A lady expert was complaining that, in his State of the Union address, George W. Bush had made no mention of "climate change".
This is true in the narrow sense that, if you were hoping for some meaningless bit of Clintonesque hot-air micropolitics, the President didn't boldly pledge to join America's European allies in pretending to abide by the Kyoto Treaty.
But, in the broader sense, Bush doesn't need to talk about climate change, because he's doing it: he's changing the climate at home and abroad.
Social Security is the so-called third rail of American politics, but he's seized it and right now it's the comatose Democrats who look like they could use a jolt or two. As for the wider world, if one had to nominate a third rail of global politics, attempting to democratise the Middle East would be pretty much a shoo-in. But Bush has made it an explicit and urgent goal of US foreign policy, and from the proud purple fingers of the Iraq vote to the more tentative toe in the water of the Saudi municipal elections things seem to be trending his way. This is a President who wants to leave his mark on more than a cocktail dress.
Go back to the 2002 State of the Union that inaugurated the "axis of evil". I loved the expression mainly because all the sophisticates loathed it. Such rhetoric "gets us nowhere", complained Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister. It was unhelpfully "absolutist" and "in unilateralist overdrive", sneered Chris Patten, the EU's External Affairs Commissioner. Why, it was "absurd", scoffed Hubert Védrine, the French Foreign Minister.
So much for the axis of ennui. If "axis of evil" had just been a cheap rhetorical flourish to wind 'em up, I'd still have been in favour, cheap rhetorical flourishes being my currency. But three years on it's plain that Bush meant it: one-third of the evildoers is in jail, his people have been liberated, and their country has just held the most free and fair election in modern Middle Eastern history.
That last wasn't supposed to happen either. "They can't have an election right now," declared John Kerry, Senator Nuance himself, in the presidential debates. "I personally do not believe they're going to be ready for the election in January," said Jimmy Carter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peanuts. "There's no security there."
But Carter and Kerry and Old Europe were wrong, and the absurd absolutist simpleton was right. Iraq is free not just because of the military skill of America and her allies but because of the political will of one man, who stuck to his guns against the opposition of the Eurocynics, the UN do-nothings, the Democratic Party weathervanes, the media doom-mongers, and the unreal realpolitik grandees of his own party - the Brent Scowcrofts and Larry Eagleburgers, and other colossi from the Bush père administration. Even if you strongly disagree with the President's policies, you ought surely to concede that when he sets his mind to something it tends to happen.
So now, in his 2005 speech, Bush has not only not abandoned his axis of evil, he's sportingly offered to promote Syria to the vacant slot, made a pretty specific pledge of solidarity to the Iranian people, and served notice on the House of Saud and the thug Mubarak that they better get with the programme. No doubt Monsieur Védrine would denounce these vulgarities as equally "absurd" if he was still in government.
But what's the betting on the lie of the land three years hence? Moving in the Bush direction? Or more in line with the Kerry-Carter-Védrine-Fischer-Patten view of things? The transnational establishment's alternative to Bush dynamism was summed up by last week's complacent UN report on Darfur: appoint a committee that agrees on the need to do nothing until everyone's dead.
By happy coincidence, that's also the Democrats' line on Social Security. In a sense, these two issues are opposite sides of the same coin. It was noted in the chancelleries of certain capitals that, in a speech aimed in large part at a global audience, the President didn't even mention Europe. Why would he? One reason why the Continent is in no position to make any useful contribution to the war on terror or reform of the Middle East is because of its inability to get to grips with the looming disaster of its own state pensions liabilities.
For purposes of comparison, by 2050 public pensions expenditures are expected to be 6.5 per cent of GDP in the United States, 16.9 per cent in Germany, 17.3 per cent in Spain, and 24.8 per cent in Greece. In Europe, we're looking at not the prospect of having to reduce benefits (the Democratic Party's big scare scenario) but of total societal collapse. With a death-spiral fertility rate of 1.46 children per couple, the EU will have to increase mainly Muslim immigration to a rate no stable society has ever attempted.
American reformers like to say that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (after the celebrated New England fraudster's prototype pyramid scheme). The EU has a vastly greater problem: the entire modern European welfare state is a Ponzi scheme. And the political establishments in Paris, Berlin, Brussels et al show no sign of producing their own plain-spoken EuroBush to confront it.
Unlike Eurocomplacency or Democratic Party reactionary torpor, Bush's boldness acknowledges the challenge of the times. In this climate, you have to push your own changes.