As Prime Minister Sharon arrives for a visit with President Bush in Texas today, we find ourselves in a mood to step back and reflect on the extraordinary relationship – and achievements – of these two wartime leaders. We have just come through four years in which the conduct of the American-Israel relationship has never been better. It has been less acrimonious, less patronizing in either direction, less tainted by posturing. It has been understated, practical, principled, and active. Mr. Sharon’s office and the White House have spoken almost every day since the outbreak of the world war, as both leaders have grasped the importance of working together in a larger struggle than any theater.

Indeed, one has to pinch oneself to remember that little more than four years ago, an enemy of Israel (and America), Yasser Arafat, was the most frequent visitor to the White House and Secretary of State Albright was obsessed with trying to force Israel into being more forthcoming in its dealings with the Palestinian Arabs. We do not suggest that the Clinton administration was hostile to Israel, simply that its conduct of our relationship with the Jewish state was flawed. It came within a whisker of forcing Jerusalem into a deal that would have been a disaster for Israel and for the cause of Western democracy.

No doubt historians will study how the turnaround in Israel-American relations was achieved. Much attention will be made to Mr. Bush’s visit to Israel when he was governor of Texas and was escorted by Mr. Sharon around the topography that discloses the logic of a hard-line policy. We do not suggest that the younger man was naive in respect of any of this. But he grasped that in Ariel Sharon he had met a man who understood as well as any individual on the planet the vast array of forces and materiel and political factors known as the order of battle.

It also turns out that Mr. Sharon was articulating – before either Mr. Bush or Natan Sharansky – the strategic vision that peace depended more than anything else on the spread of democracy. Even before Oslo, when Israel was just sitting down to meet with its enemies at Madrid, Mr. Sharon went to Oxford University and, in one of the greatest speeches ever given by a Western leader, spoke of the notion that real democracies do not attack one another and that little could be obtained by negotiating with the dictators and kleptocrats who have been holding power in Arab countries. Oh, how he was reviled by the left back then for advancing such ideas.

These were ideas that Mr. Bush echoed when he entered the Rose Garden in June of 2002 and asserted he would not deal with the Palestinian Arabs until they had established a democracy and elevated leaders untainted by terror. He was the first American president to adopt this hard line, and his great achievement was to extend these principles onto the world stage. The big issue in Texas is going to be whether the two partners in this relationship are going to stand by the logic of the principles enunciated at Oxford and in the Rose Garden and at points in between. Both are under a burden in this respect.

Mr. Sharon is under pressure from his right flank, where many of our friends reside, in respect of the pullout from Gaza and his adjustment of the lines. We have too much regard for them to belittle their concerns, and too much regard for Mr. Sharon to gainsay his authority to maneuver according to his best judgment as an elected leader of a democratic state. He has more than earned the right to be judged by the voters and by history. Mr. Bush himself has earned his bona fides as a wartime leader, and it makes no sense for him to be concerning himself with whether Israel wants to build 3,500 new homes at Maaleh Adumim.

The gains so far have been made precisely because Mr. Bush resisted calls from Europe and his State Department to treat the terrorists who threaten to destroy Israel any differently than those that threaten America. These commitments need constant refreshing, as is clear from the dispatch from our Eli Lake, on page one of the Sun today, reporting that the European Union has been treating with Hamas throughout much of its long campaign of suicide bombings against Israel. Certainly both leaders recognize that the war between the Arabs and Israel is not the cause of, but a part of, the terrorist war between Islamist extremists and the Free World.