The United States still has 150,000 troops in Iraq, although Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made clear publicly on July 7 that he wants them out -- and soon.

Another 36,000 U.S. troops are fighting the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, and really not doing a very good job of it. Even Sen. Barack Obama, D.-Ill., the Democratic Party's standard bearer for the fall presidential election, has said he wants to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by at least another 10,000 troops.

And the collapse of the Georgian army, on whom Washington has lavished so much military aid over the past eight years has sent a shiver of fear running down the spines of every Eastern and Central European country that thought since the collapse of communism, it could shelter with impunity beneath the great U.S. military umbrella and thumb its nose at Russia.

One would assume that the growing complexities of Iraq and frustrations in Afghanistan, followed by the humiliation last week in Georgia of a favored ally, would have taught Bush some caution at last, but it is far from clear that it has done so. U.S. leaders have certainly made reassuring noises about responsibility and restraint over taking preemptive action against Iran, but the massing of U.S. naval forces, backed even by significant British and French units, belies those soothing words.

We therefore recommend that Bush for his late summer reading abandons for once the endless hagiographies of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln he is said to favor and read English historian Correlli Barnett's classic 1970 work "The Collapse of British Power."

Barnett documents how Britain's position as the world's hyper-power in the 1920s and 1930s could not be sustained, because she took on far too many security burdens scattered around the world when she no longer had the financial, industrial and military resources to carry all of them.

Bush appears oblivious to these lessons: We think Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate, is blind to them as well.

Even Sen. Obama acts as if U.S. global military and financial dominance is something he can take for granted when he is president, and that he will be free to rapidly increase the number of U.S. troops operating in Afghanistan, whatever happens in different parts of the world.

However, in Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dimitry Medvedev called the bluff of U.S. global power.

When will Bush and his would-be successors finally wake up and realize that the world is no longer a checker board for their moralistic crusades any more?