Bill Clinton's Lost World

President George Bush could build an awesome multilateral coalition for going to war with Saddam Hussein, but he didn’t know the price of milk. That was the story of the 1992 presidential campaign, in which Bill Clinton sold himself to America as a candidate focused exclusively on domestic policy. Seven years later, however, Clinton has just roasted President Bush’s party as hostages to a "new isolationism," the Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test …

…security treaties. Whether the cause has been his own personal failings, or the rise of an ideologically driven conservatism in the GOP, or simply the foreign policy vacuum created by the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton has presided over a diluting of the authority of the presidency over Washington’s relations with the wider world. Which makes it less certain that the century that is about to dawn will be another American one.