Wise quacks

The best passage in President Bush’s penultimate State of the Union address on Tuesday was an admission of the transience of his own administration and of the newly composed Congress he was addressing. ‘The war on terror we fight today,’ he said, ‘is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.’ The many disappointments of the Bush presidency have already been chronicled. But the conflict into which the West was driven on 9/11 will long survive him, as it will Tony Blair’s premiership.

Confronted with a new and restless Congress, the President is the lamest of lame ducks. To say the least, he will have his work cut out between now and 20 January 2009, when the 44th President is inaugurated. His disastrous poll ratings match those of Nixon shortly before his resignation (how pointed that E. Howard Hunt, the shadowy ‘black ops’ figure at the heart of the Watergate break-in in 1972, should die on the very day that Mr Bush delivered his address). But even a lame duck can speak the truth.

Like Mr Blair in his twilight, Mr Bush has become ever more preoccupied in his second term with global issues that will not and cannot be resolved quickly: population mobility, the environment, the war on terror. At the same time, the principal international institutions — notably the United Nations — have failed utterly to drag themselves into the 21st century and confront these dilemmas. This leaves America in the unenviable position of being the world’s only hyper-power — increasingly reviled by the armchair nations of the West, which demand that the United States continue in its role as global policeman while reserving the right to deploy the weapon of hindsight when it suits them.