Senator Clinton gave a big foreign policy speech yesterday titled “New American Strategies for Security and Peace.” These columns have almost uniformly praised Mrs. Clinton on foreign policy, from her threat to withhold funding from the International Red Cross unless it admitted Israel, to her votes for the war in Iraq and for the $87 billion in funding for finishing the job there and in Afghanistan. We recently lauded Mrs. Clinton for criticizing the first Bush administration for not having gone all the way to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam Hussein during the last Gulf War.

So what a disappointment then, was yesterday’s speech, in which Mrs. Clinton threw false accusations at the Bush administration without offering a serious alternative of her own. “In our efforts abroad, we now go to war as a first resort against perceived threats, not as a necessary final resort,” Mrs. Clinton said.

What is she talking about? Certainly not Iran, where the Bush administration is pursuing a policy of negotiation in concert with Europe and the United Nations. Certainly not North Korea, where the Bush administration diplomats negotiated with representatives of the murderous tyrant Kim Jong Il in multilateral talks that included China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. Not Syria, where Secretary of State Powell fetched up in Damascus to meet with Bashar Al-Assad.

There’s plenty of room for the Democrats to criticize the Bush administration on foreign policy. But the proper criticism isn’t that President Bush has been too quick to resort to military force; it is that he has been too slow in going after rogue states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Not that we want to quarrel too much on the point. But these regimes pose genuine threats to American security, just as Iraq did. If war were the first resort, as Mrs. Clinton bizarrely claims, then what are Kim Jong Il, Bashar al-Assad, and Ayatollah Khamenei still doing ruling their countries?

Mrs. Clinton was wise enough, at least, to acknowledge yesterday, “we remain at war.”Yet what do she and her fellow Democrats propose to do about our enemies? Her speech yesterday was full of talk about the Kyoto Protocol and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. “Just proclaiming the evil of our adversary is not a strategy,” Mrs. Clinton said yesterday. Well, just proclaiming the evil of the Bush administration and the merits of Kyoto Protocol is not a strategy, either. America’s enemies are real and determined and deadly. If the Democrats are going to convince many voters that they are better able than Mr. Bush to defeat those enemies, they are going to have to lay out a more detailed, ambitious , and hardheaded vision than the one Mrs. Clinton presented yesterday.