Columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol lecture last week at the American Enterprise Institute. You can find the text of his talk here. It's long, but I can't emphasize enough how worthwhile it is for every American in this post-9/11 world.

Krauthammer divides foreign policy into four major schools of thought and the implications of each and exposes the Democrat Party's beliefs (liberal internationalism) for the foolishness they are.

The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, anti-ballistic missiles, etc.

Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would “provide us with a valuable tool”--the “moral suasion of the entire international community.”

Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.

A vote for John Kerry, or any other Democrat (with Joe Lieberman out of the race) is a vote for surrender in the war on terror. With Al Gore as president, the Taliban probably would have been defeated. But Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and possibly no longer under U.N. sanctions. Libya would still be secretly building a WMD program. Iran would still be holding the IAEA at arms length as it built nuclear weapons.

In an effort to win French, German and Russian approval for our foreign policy, Democrats would have done little -- and the world would be a much more dangerous place.