Churchill, not quite.

• Author: Allison, Graham
• Position: The Realist

PRESIDENT BUSH has identified the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons as "the single largest threat to American national security." Indeed, he has said that the United States is currently engaged in World War III and put a bust of Winston Churchill in his office. The question he should ask himself is: What would Churchill do facing a grave threat to his society and way of life? How closely do the president's actions mirror his model? An American Churchill confronting a threat of such monumental proportions would make defeating this challenge the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy.

Churchill was a life-long anti-communist, and had few illusions about the Stalin regime. To defeat Nazi Germany, however, Churchill was prepared to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union and to accept that the USSR would incorporate some additional territories. In fact, Britain even declared war against democratic Finland because the country cooperated with Berlin, even though Finland entered the war against the Soviet Union only in an attempt to reclaim territory occupied by Moscow.

No Churchillian willingness to establish a hierarchy of priorities is evident in the Bush Administration's current foreign policy, particularly once democracy promotion officially replaced the fight against terror as the number one U.S. objective in the world.

From a realist perspective, the president deserves applause on two fronts for his recent performance at the recent St. Petersburg G-8 Summit, where both of us were present. First, he rejected the council of ideological instant-democratizers to boycott the St. Petersburg Summit, or seek to expel Russia from this club of advanced industrial democracies. It is noteworthy that advocates of such a misguided course were found not only in his administration but in equal, if not greater, numbers among his Democratic opponents. Moreover, he refrained from publicly hectoring or lecturing Vladimir Putin about Russia's unquestionable backsliding from democracy, reserving candid discussion of differences to private conversation that was, no doubt, more effective than the alternative.

Second, on an issue both presidents have identified as an overriding threat not only to their nations but globally, they announced three important steps forward: a new Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism; a plan for multiple, multilateral guaranteed supplies of nuclear fuel to states that forgo building their own enrichment plants; and a Civil Nuclear Agreement that will lift restrictions on cooperation between the two countries in developing peaceful nuclear power.

Each of these initiatives provides a framework for dozens of specific actions that can measurably reduce the risk of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon. Together they suggest that the Bush Administration is finally beginning to see this challenge whole and developing a comprehensive strategy for addressing it.

The significance of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism lies not only in its substance but in Russia's visible joint-ownership of the Initiative. At the press conference on Saturday, President Putin led with...