"Not on my watch," wrote President Bush in early September 2001, in the margin of a report on President Clinton’s limp response to the 1994 genocide that took 800,000 lives in Rwanda.

President Bush claims that his tough, confrontational approach to the bad guys of the world has made America safer. But on his watch, the world’s most dangerous regime — North Korea — has openly declared that it is building nuclear bombs as fast as it can. It may already (experts speculate) have as many as a dozen, and it shows signs of preparing its first nuclear bomb test. Nukes in the hands of this paranoid, impoverished regime — which is also building long-range missiles and seems quite capable of selling nukes to Al Qaeda — represent a vastly greater threat to American cities than Saddam Hussein ever did.

It’s unclear whether any president could have prevented this, short of war. But it’s hard to imagine anyone doing much worse than Bush has done. Looking to the future, would John Kerry do better? The answer may turn on a blood-curdling choice: Would it be better to pin all our hopes on peaceful negotiations that seem less than likely to stop North Korea from building a vast nuclear arsenal? Or should we threaten — and, if necessary, launch — pre-emptive bombing attacks that could lead to another all-out Korean war and even the nuking of South Korea and Japan?

Much of what goes by the name "international law" in academic and European circles these days deserves little respect from the United States, because it consists of rules made by foreign judges and professors that this sovereign nation has never adopted as binding. Many internationalists claim, for example, that firing missiles at terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden, as President Clinton once did, and aggressively interrogating captured terrorists, as the Bush administration is doing, violate international law. Bosh.

Three years ago, my friend Don Kendall employed 2,100 Americans in gleaming, highly automated plants in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Vermont, making high-end computer servers, mass-storage devices, telecommunications routers, and hundreds of other products. Now, those same plants employ just 1,100 workers. Most of the 1,000 who have been laid off have had to take retail, tourism, or other service-sector jobs paying about half of what they made before — if they have found jobs at all.

The Bush administration is in the midst of making momentous decisions about how to deal with the United Nations in the post-Saddam era. Those decisions will critically affect our chances of winning the peace in Iraq and of proving our claims that Saddam had an arsenal of banned weapons-claims on which President Bush has staked his credibility. And they will set the direction of America’s relations with the rest of the world for years to come.

International rules lose their validity when widely flouted or when superseded by new strategic realities. The U.N. Charter’s curbs on the use of military force had suffered both fates long before George W. Bush became president. America’s pattern of acting without Security Council authorization-justifiably, in at least some cases-dates back at least to the 1962 Cuban missile blockade and has marked U.S. military activities in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, and Nicaragua.