If matters of life and death weren’t at stake, it’d be comical. The Democrats finally decide they need a foreign policy, so they send out two of their stars, Howard Dean and Senator Clinton, to make what are billed as major national security policy speeches. And they both stumble.

We’re more sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton, perhaps because she represents us in the Senate, she voted for the Iraq war, and she had the graciousness yesterday to congratulate President Bush for capturing Saddam Hussein. We’re appreciative of her efforts to position herself on the party’s right wing by calling for a larger standing army and by speaking of a “muscular foreign and defense policy.”

But it’s hard to escape the assessment of Mrs. Clinton as dangerously unserious when it comes to these matters. How could she give what was billed as a “major foreign policy address”and fail to deal with the topic of Iran, one of America’s top strategic challenges?

Her suggested strategy for North Korea — negotiate directly with Kim Jong Il — seems to consign the people of northern Korea to life under the Communist boot. Her suggested strategy of giving the United Nations a greater role in postwar Iraq ignores the reality that the world body discredited itself in the run-up to the war and fled the moment that the going got tough in postwar Iraq. And Mrs. Clinton’s criticism of Israel for building a security fence ignores the record of the fence’s success in Gaza.

More broadly, the senator’s claim that “the more we throw our weight around, the more we encourage other nations to join with each other as a counterweight” is a defeatist recipe for American mousiness. Our view is that when America throws its weight around in support of its principles, we often end up advancing freedom. And the people we free end up remembering us in gratitude. Just ask the Poles who remembered our help during the Cold War and have now sent troops to patrol alongside America in Iraq.

Mrs. Clinton laid out a dispirited, dispiriting view of both America and Israel. “I worry about the fear that I see amongst so many of our citizens,” she said, not exactly channeling Franklin Roosevelt. “History and demography may not be on Israel’s side,” she said. What a contrast to President Bush’s view — and ours — that Americans are a brave nation, and that history is on the side of freedom and democracy.

Dr. Dean, for his part, made the enormous blunder of claiming in his speech yesterday that “the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.”It must have sent heads shaking across America. Senator Lieberman set the record straight when he said, “Howard Dean has climbed into his own spider hole of denial if he believes that the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer. Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, brutal dictator, supporter of terrorism, and enemy of the United States, and there should be no doubt that America and the world are safer with him captured.”

Dr. Dean made the further blunder yesterday of releasing a list of about 15 foreign policy and national security advisers, including one, Clyde Prestowitz, whose recent book should disqualify him from any place in the American political mainstream. “I have often felt that America’s differences with the world could be largely explained in four words: Israel, Taiwan, religion, and lobby,” Mr. Prestowitz wrote in his book “Rogue Nation,” released this year.

“In its policies toward Israel and Taiwan,” Dr. Dean’s adviser wrote, “America continues to do itself enormous damage and create intense, needless enmity toward itself by allowing its view of reality to be distorted by intensely self-interested groups and by willfully averting its eyes from contrary evidence. Our system of government, with its separation of powers, facilitates capture of key positions by dedicated minorities that are sometimes heavily influenced by foreign elements whose interests are at odds with those of the United States.”

Appointing Mr. Prestowitz to his advisory group is, for Dr. Dean, of a piece with his call for American neutrality in the war against the Jewish state. The doctor is in over his head. But Mrs. Clinton is a different problem. We disagree with her often, but she is a brilliant woman and a serious player, who could do an enormous amount for the Democrats by staking out a hard-headed position on foreign affairs. It didn’t, unfortunately, happen yesterday. If what did happen is what the Democratic foreign policy looks like, it’s easy to understand why the party has been so reluctant, up till now, to display it.