SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — As the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has shifted to New Hampshire, those still in the race have at least one thing in common: Each candidate argues that, in his own way, he is equipped to challenge President Bush on the vital issue of national security.
Yet with only modest exceptions, all of them are closer to Bush than they are to any substantively different way of looking at the security issues facing the United States.
From none of the candidates have we heard anything approaching a strikingly new vision of how the United States should think about national security in a post-Cold War era marked by terrorism. And that's not because no such vision is conceivable. Rather, it's because the major Democrats -- like a herd of dairy cows trundling across a pasture -- have unthinkingly fallen in behind the tinkling bell of establishment assumptions about the world and how the United States should deal with it.
Consider the defense budget. The Democrats express a variety of views on the details of the Bush administration's $87-billion supplemental spending plan for Iraq, and on the wisdom of particular expenditures. But none of the frontrunners argues that the United States spends too much on defense -- even though no other nation sees any reason to spend even a significant fraction of what the Pentagon consumes each year.
Similarly, the Democrats oppose the administration's current effort to develop "mini-nukes"; they also support a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. But none of the major Democratic candidates espouses anything close to nuclear disarmament, not even as a goal.
All the candidates support arms control, respect for international law and the notion that the United States should do a better job working with the international community. Nominally, at least, Bush says most of those things too, though he and the Democratic hopefuls obviously mean something different in specific situations. But how would anyone but the experts know?
Even former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who owed his early popularity to his opposition to the Iraq war, believes that nuclear weapons "are a fact of life" and that the American response to any use of weapons of mass destruction should be "overwhelming and devastating." Effective missile defenses would be an important part of his national security strategy, he has said. Dean even embraces the principle of preemptive war in response to an imminent threat to the United States, or to prevent genocide.
