Robert Kagan is an eminent and provocative strategic commentator and one of the chief authors of the successful Iraqi “surge” which has redeemed that conflict from the appalling fiasco it appeared to be only 18 months ago. In his recently published book, “The Return of History and the End of Dreams” (Knopf, 128 pages, $19.95), he rightly debunks Francis Fukuyama and other millennial forecasters of the permanent and universal triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. But he goes too far in predicting a retreat toward the Great Power world before 1914, and a world divided between alliances of democratic and autocratic states.

While the Iraq war is now likely to be at least a partial American success, the era of America as unilateralist superpower has not been a success. The United Nations and NATO and most other international institutions are in desperate need of reform, but neither the Clinton nor the current Bush administration, (nor any other country, conspicuously including Canada), has taken a lead in starting this process. The UN is an anthill of perversity and corruption, and the degeneration of NATO into a “coalition of the willing” means that it is almost moribund; sustained by a general desire for an American military guaranty, especially on the part of countries formerly in the Soviet empire.

It has been 35 years since President Nixon warned that it was strategically dangerous for America to import 20% of its oil, and started Project Independence to address the problem. He was hounded from office and no president since then has done anything useful about it; the country now imports 60% of much larger oil needs at about 10 times the price per barrel. Some large and hostile oil exporters, especially Iran and Venezuela, were American allies then. Now politicians from Al Gore to John McCain are calling relatively robustly for energy self-sufficiency. George W. Bush’s greatest error was probably failing to produce a serious energy policy after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the country would have signed on to anything sensible, almost regardless of the short-term inconvenience.

Moreover, Mr. Bush had done nothing to alleviate the hemorrhaging current account deficit except devalue the American dollar, which in the short term aggravates the problem. The deficit has been $600 to $800 billion for some years (40% of its oil imports), a totally unsustainable figure. This, along with three years of foundering in Iraq (though Bush took a little longer than Lincoln or Churchill did to adopt the right strategy and promote the best commanders in their wars), has immobilized America and made it seem a very unimposing superpower. Mr. Bush and his advisers were right to suspect that the great outpouring of solidarity after September 11, 2001, was partly motivated by a desire by America’s allies to collegialize and moderate American responses to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Some of them may even have been consolable to think of America, finally, as a victim. But as America was the country attacked, its government had a right to respond as it believed the national interest required, as long as it behaved responsibly. Engineering regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq were commendable objectives and achievements. They were both terrorist-supporting states and as long as the West lives on imported oil, it is hazardous to have both Iran and Iraq in hostile hands. But it would have been possible to cloak the Iraq action in as much international cover as the Afghan initiative, if Colin Powell had been given more time and more leeway to do it.

The Bush administration was correct to make the point that it could undertake such an operation without being dependent on its allies, but then it had an obligation to carry out its mission crisply and efficiently. Having failed to do that, Mr. Bush has at least achieved the secondary objective of proving that bin Laden and others were mistaken in claiming that America had no military staying power and would be quickly traumatized by returning body bags, as in the Somalian debacle. Credible Great Powers cannot be thus perceived. As Iraq continues to improve and America finally becomes serious about energy imports, and more constructive governments take hold in France, Germany, and Italy, a world that is neither unipolar nor multipolar, but led by a renascent political alliance headed by America, should emerge. The end of terrible national animosities in Europe is a great and benign event, but the European Union is an overbureaucratized shambles, almost inert economically, and stranded between nation-states and confederation. Europe wants, and should receive, leadership from an American president to whom it cannot condescend, like Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Nixon. It is not clear that such a candidate is on offer this year, but there is room for hope.

Of course Russia and China are not democracies, but they are closer to democracy than to the totalitarian terror-states run in those countries for almost 30 years by Stalin and Mao. There is nothing sinister in their quest for Great Power recognition. China has intermittently had that status much longer than any other country, and Russia has been a Great Power since the time of Peter the Great (late 17th century), when the

Americans were a scattering of colonial settlers terrified by the French in Canada and the indigenous peoples.

Russia is a great nationality and land mass, but demographically, it is down to barely a third of the empire it controlled just 20 years ago. It will not regain the millions of fervent ideological adherents all over the world that it had as the leader of international communism. Nor will it have the huge puppet, political parties representing its interests in France and Italy that menaced those countries from within for decades, and were only narrowly outmaneuvered by de Gaulle in France and Pius XII in Italy. Only the rise in oil prices has made Putinism appear successful. Russia has a declining population and life expectancy, and, in “The Return of History,” Mr. Kagan takes its claims to revival too seriously. If America reduces oil imports and therefore prices, it will have the added benefit of exposing the Russian revival as a fraud. (Nor did Russia impose Louis XVIII on France in 1815, as Mr. Kagan claims; the British and Prussian armies were in France, not the Russian.)

Mr. Kagan is not an economist and should not be so confident of continued, vertiginous Chinese economic growth. But Russia and China can, if advisable, be accommodated without dishonoring the West or sacrificing its strategic interests. There is little history of Chinese strategic impetuosity, and as long as they do not become neurotic about Taiwan, there is no reason for any particular friction. A Grand Alliance, led by America, France, Germany, Japan, England, and India should always be able to outbid China or Russia for any country’s goodwill, including each other’s.

Unless Western statesmen are completely incompetent, the Chinese and Russians should prefer cordiality with the West in a civilized world condominium to fruitless harassment, much less confrontation. The Western democracies don’t have much difficulty consorting with dictatorships. Churchill and Roosevelt got on better with Stalin than Hitler did; India got on better with the USSR than China did. Franco and Salazar and the Turkish generals were exemplary members of NATO.

An alliance of undemocratic powers would not reliably yoke together enough geopolitical strength and mass to be a successful rival to this Grand Alliance. The struggle in Russia and China between the nativists and Western emulators will continue. Again, assuming a modicum of intelligence in the chancelleries of the West, we should be able to make life easier for our natural allies within those countries by emphasizing civil rights, growth economics, and imaginative diplomacy.

Mr. Kagan is right that rulers promote, and populations tolerate, autocracies, and that China and Russia won’t help overthrow despots, as in Iran and Burma. But they won’t protect them either. Nor, as they showed with North Korea, will they tolerate being threatened by them. He is also right to credit the current U.S. president for improving relations with Japan, several major Arab states, and especially India, ending 60 years of frosty relations with that country just as it started to develop impressive economic traction.

Ultimately the Russians and Chinese are just as much threatened by Islamic extremism as the West is, and the threat to the West is not a fraction as serious as were those of Imperial and Nazi Germany and their allies, and of the Cold War U.S.S.R. There are only about 20,000 Islamic terrorists in the world. They are a terrible and treacherous nuisance but not a serious rival or a mortal threat to our civilization.

The American challenge is to restore American political authority and panache, recover the country’s economic strength, re-energize and expand the Western Alliance, and resume the practice of most presidents, from Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush, of leading the alliance strongly without seeming to be an authoritarian recruiting sergeant.

It must be said that American foreign policy leadership has been generally astute and sometimes inspired throughout most of the last 70 years, since Roosevelt quietly dissented from Munich and began to prepare for war and the end of American isolationism. America need only make its alliance more pleasing and reassuring to associated countries than their subordinacy is irritating.

As long as they keep in mind the Richelieu, Palmerston, and Bismarck principle of maintaining their legitimate interests without uniting the world against them — as Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelm II, and Hitler did — the Western leaders have an opportunity for peace and prosperity unlike any since the golden era of Rome in the second century, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius. This isn’t the end of history, but it isn’t living on a hair trigger with the lights apt to go out all over Europe at any time, either.

Conrad Black is the author, most recently, of “Nixon: A Life in Full.” This article originally appeared in the National Post.