Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away.

THE subtitle of this book sums up how many around the world feel about the last eight years of American foreign policy. I say eight, not four, because the rot started under George Bush. Would it have been conceivable during the Reagan Presidency that Central Europe would free itself from Communist domination only to see American ambassadors in the region exert pressure against dissolving the Warsaw Pact? Yet that is exactly what happened in Budapest and Warsaw in 1990. Could anybody believe that when the Red Army broke various treaties and tried to conquer a small nation in the Caucasus, the United States, far from backing Russian dissidents opposing the war, would continue to finance the Kremlin war party? Yet that is what happened when Bill Clinton declared the Russian invasion of Chechnya an ''internal affair'' and increased World Bank credits to Russia. It took President Clinton three years to cut through European dithering and stop the slaughter in Bosnia. Is it any wonder that America's friends and admirers are feeling disappointed and dejected? Freedom Betrayed is the sort of book that Alexis de Tocqueville would write if he were alive today: crisp, hard-headed, and utterly brilliant. Like any good Leninist, Mr. Ledeen understands that America's strength or weakness in foreign affairs is not just a reflection of the global correlation of forces but stems directly from its performance at home. America is destined to lead the world not only because it has the strongest army, but because the American idea -- self-reliance, democracy, capitalism, limited government -- has triumphed. The paradox is that just as the world is emulating America, America itself is drifting.