BUSH GETS GOOD GRIP ON INTERNATIONAL TOPICS

Defying the disdain of his many critics, including Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who blasted him as he left our shores, President Bush completed a highly successful trip to Europe for the summit of the world's leading industrial nations. It was quite a performance, one that saw the beginnings of the final interment of the misguided and profoundly unfair Kyoto Treaty on global emissions. The president's successes have one common thread: They are the result of his having staked out a firm position, and then holding tough on it.

History may record that it was at the summit in Genoa, Italy, that nearly every serious player on the world stage began, more or less, to agree: It is time to write "finis" for the Kyoto Treaty. Of course, many realists could foresee this when the U.S. Senate voted 95-0, back in 1997, to declare it a dead letter even before the Clinton administration had submitted it for ratification. (They never did.) But it took the president's firmness and steadfastness on the world stage to place Kyoto on its path to becoming a truly endangered species.

Also front and center on the president's journey was a meeting with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. Bush and Putin appear to have hit it off in a major way. The two leaders, said the Associated Press story on their meeting, "pledged to pursue deep cuts in nuclear arsenals and link the offensive weapons talks to negotiations over Bush's missile defense plans." Said Putin of his new friend, the American president: "It seems to me that his mental reasoning is very deep, very profound. Both of us are aiming at a partnership."

All this was quite stunning to many in the New York-Washington power elite, who specialize in disdaining Bush and especially his capacity for conducting American foreign policy. Writing in his twice-weekly column, Washington Times columnist Wes Pruden put it this way:

"The Bush triumph was so unexpected that nobody quite knew what to make of it. The media elites retreated into familiar cliches. The Washington Post and the New York Times could hardly bring themselves to state the obvious, that the ABM treaty was left mortally wounded, and already beginning to give off a distinct aroma."

Cuts in nuclear arms, exceeding expectations of the elite media, holding tough in international negotiations: President Bush would appear to be taking a page out of the book of the book of President Ronald Reagan. We Americans, and the world, should be so lucky.