Happy Days Are Here Again

It's always risky to celebrate security and good times, especially in an age when there is no way to rule out that along with the usual perils of life, we will suffer another terrorist attack. But this spring, more than 3 1/2 years after Sept. 11, it does seem that since that day America has weathered a rough passage awfully well. That, and with the cherry trees just done blooming in Washington and New York's Central Park full of flowers (and, in the grand old tradition, amateur baseball teams), it feels worth a moment to stand back and observe that for all the usual ructions of politics and the more prominent idiocies of such institutions as Hollywood, academia and the imploding United Nations in our midst, rarely in recent decades has there been more sanity and self-respect abroad in this land.

That is clear not only in such minor but telling details as the humor with which Laura Bush, onstage at a press dinner in Washington this weekend, poked affectionate fun at the president's early bedtime habits–and was received with clamorous applause by an audience not overly loving of George W. Bush. It is also clear in such major matters as the resolve of most Americans, despite the loud groans of our most precious elite, to stay united behind the president in the need to win both the wars and the peace, in Afghanistan, Iraq and by extension a world in which we spend less effort appeasing our enemies and do more to address real threats. Better times can be seen in an economic recovery that has left room for the country to debate such matters as the fixing of the decrepit and wasteful Social Security system. And broadly better days are manifest in the general grace with which Americans in recent times have put up with high gas prices, disastrous weather, the threat of more terrorist attacks and the costs of trying to prevent them.

It has been a while since it was popular to refer to Mr. Bush by way of the diminutive “W.” It has also been a while since anyone wondered whether Mr. Bush could name the capital of Togo, or for that matter of France. Even more to the point, it has been a while since the American press was flooded with anguished soul-searching articles exploring whether or not the rest of the world–especially in those quarters dominated by tyrants–loves us. In keeping with the doctrine of democratization that Mr. Bush put forward three years ago, the focus has switched to what we appreciate about our own values. With that comes a degree of integrity that the silent majority of the unfree world can appreciate far more than any cloying efforts by Washington to win friends by wooing despots who claim illegitimately to speak for their people.

The results have been much written about in recent times, but they bear noting again. As happened when President Reagan stood fast and spoke up in the 1980s about the “evil empire,” places deemed lost to the free world have been waking up. Not only are we seeing a huge movement for democracy in Lebanon, along with stirrings in Egypt and even Syria and Saudi Arabia. Last week, in Washington, a North Korean defector announced the founding in this country of a group of North Korean dissidents-in-exile, dedicated to replacing what is probably the worst tyranny on the planet with a free society. It is a small beginning, but it is one more sign of a world changing for the better.

It gets hard even to remember at this point, but less than five years ago, in what feels like another age of the world–and perhaps it was–the talk of America was whether our future as a democracy hung on the swinging chads of the Florida election recount. Some doubted that the republic could survive this experience unmaimed. Along with that, the dot-com bubble burst. The recession into which the country had already begun sliding got worse. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks that scorched the Pentagon and leveled the Twin Towers. And as America picked itself up from these acts of war, there were lamentations not only for those who died, but for the loss of American innocence.

It was not in truth innocence that had been lost. America, like any free nation, depends on a system of trust, engendered by liberty and rule of law. This accounted for the spell of almost odd gentility with which we treated each other in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. And it accounts for the resolve that we have by and large discovered since. What we lost was a crippling naiveté, cultivated in the narcissistic 1990s. What we regained was pride in our country, and a revived appreciation both of the values that have made America great, and the need–even at high cost, or in the face of such stuff as U.N. disapproval–to defend them.

There are exceptions, of course. We could have lived without the recent spectacle of Mr. Bush helping Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, a member of one of the world's most repressive regimes, down a bumpy path at the Crawford Ranch. We could do without the praise that has been lavished on one of the world's cruelest and most capricious dictators, Moammar Gadhafi, who gave up his nuclear bomb program out of fear, not friendship.

But overall, we have entered an era in which America–more than at any time since Ronald Reagan's presidency–speaks the truth and appreciates the worth of its own system, which is what has made it both powerful and free. More tough tests lie ahead. But I think it is worth taking a moment, in spring, to note how well we have weathered those of recent years.

– Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.