How now, cowboy? The uses and abuses of a national icon.

'THE end of cowboy diplomacy," Time magazine recently announced of George W. Bush's supposed turn to softer talk and more multilateral policymaking. The Beltway consensus is that the beleaguered president has finally learned that he cannot posture as the lone ranger on the frontier. Instead he has concluded that, in a sophisticated world where all nations are interdependent, there is no place for his "smoke 'em out," "dead or alive" Weltanschauung--or even for those post-9/11 photo-ops in which he drove his pickup around the ranch to chainsaw brush while wearing a Stetson and shades.

So we are likely to hear no more "Get out of Dodge" threats, as when the president gave Saddam and his sons 48 hours to clear out of Iraq. And he probably won't return to a meeting of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association for an encore performance of his February 2002 Wyatt Earp-like warning: "Either you're with us or you're against us." Perhaps he no longer resembles the youthful and cocky John Wayne who, playing the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, cleaned out the villainous Plummer clan. Has Iraq instead made him like the older, more circumspect John Wayne playing his last role as the dying J. B. Books of The Shootist, a man who accepts that both he and his Wild West world don't belong in the new century?

Europeans, we are told, sigh in relief at the end of all this black-and-white, good-versus-evil frontier justice. Their preferred American leader is a metrosexual John Kerry or Al Gore who wears tasteful earth tones, dribbles effusive praise of the U.N., and speaks at Davos of coalition building, Kyoto, and consultation with the EU. Indeed, Gore dismissed Bush's showdown with Saddam as a "do-it-alone, cowboy-type reaction to foreign affairs." And then he tried to turn Bush's cowboyism on its head: "There's ample basis for taking off after Saddam, but before you ride out after Jesse James, you ought to put the posse together."

Many Americans, however, remember from their Old West lore that while the posse bickers and dithers the outlaw gets away--just as Saddam spent twelve years violating U.N. resolutions, flouting weapons inspections, and breaking his 1991 Gulf War surrender promises. At least some of the president's former appeal, then, was precisely his resemblance to a 19th-century cowboy.

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John Wayne, deep in the saddle, still has a far stronger emotional pull on Americans than contemporary yuppieism--as we learned in 2004 when the public tired of seeing John Kerry wearing spandex while windsurfing or biking. Unlike those in Europe or the blue coastal states, most Americans have a positive image of the cowboy. They see him neither as a psychopathic killer like Billy the Kid nor even as resembling the murderous anti-heroes of director Sam Peckinpah's Wild Bunch--over-the-hill outlaws who go down in a blaze of glory and take almost everyone in their midst with them.

Instead, the cowboy more often evokes Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane of High Noon. When given the chance to ride out of Hadleyville for a much-deserved retirement with his new wife, Kane instead turns back to face the Miller gang alone. Although the prospects of survival are slim, he won't run or abandon his town, even though it would rather appease the killers. This is no bad thing for the community, just as there are those who benefit from cowboy Bush's willingness to confront bullies like Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Kim Jong Il, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--even if the Europeans, like the townspeople of Hadleyville, delude themselves into thinking that the Millers of our world will leave them alone if their stubborn self-appointed protector just rides away. The recent unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah, and the bellicosity of their patrons Iran and Syria, should disabuse everyone of such naivete.

George Bush also understands that, beyond rugged individualism, tough language, and resolute action, there is another strain in the American myth of the selfless cowboy: that of the tragic hero. Although Will Kane shoots the outlaws and saves Hadleyville, he ultimately throws down his star and rides out as originally planned. The relieved townspeople don't want the marshal to stay on after the carnage.

An even better reminder of the willingness of the American cowboy to depart after he cleans up the town is George Stevens's 1953 classic, Shane. When a mysterious former gunslinger rides into a picturesque mountain valley, he finds the forces of civilization in the form of "sodbusters" preyed on by a ruthless cattle magnate who doesn't want his survival-of-the-fittest world tamed by fences and do-good homesteaders. Unfortunately, the farmers' vision of a lawful and ordered society makes them almost helpless against range marauders when there is no judge, sheriff, or jury to protect them. When the beleaguered homesteaders discuss the lawlessness of the range hands, they sound about as impotent as the U.N. Security Council. Enter Shane with his mysterious checkered past. He reluctantly shoots the cattle baron and his hired guns, and then trots off wounded into the sunset--resigned that the very methods he employs to save civilization taint him and make him unable to live within it once the threat is past.

That theme of Greek tragedy--Sophocles' dramas Ajax and Philoctetes center on the flawed hero whom we both shun and need--is a Western constant. In The Magnificent Seven, hired guns--outcasts--ride in to save a Mexican village from bandits. Then, after the bloodletting, the surviving Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen depart, knowing they are not to enjoy the tranquility and order that they have alone been able to provide through their gunplay.

Director John Ford also captured that tragic sense brilliantly in The Searchers. Only a near-psychopathic John Wayne as Ethan Edwards can track down the renegade Comanche band of Chief Scar, who has captured his niece. This is precisely because Edwards is himself not altogether civilized. And in Ford's Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Wayne played stoic Tom Doniphon, who is willing to bushwhack the no-good Liberty Valance--if it means saving the bumbling lawyer Ransom Stoddard, whose books are the proper civilized future of the imperiled town of Shinbone. Both Edwards and Doniphon accept the paradox that there is no future for the brutal defender of society once he has vanquished the savagery that threatened it.

Perhaps George Bush understands the irony of the good cowboy. If so, he has accepted both that someone had to deal with Saddam Hussein after international scolds and U.N. sanctions failed to corral him, and that the self-appointed enforcer would eventually find himself alone and stigmatized as uncouth by the very ones who so often called for Saddam's ouster. Just as there is more to the cowboy myth than "shoot 'em up" justice and throwaway lines about lynching bad guys, so too there may be more to Bush's evocation of the frontier than his strut and his twangy braggadocio. He surely knows that his willingness to go it alone--whether by introducing the term "Axis of Evil," renouncing the ABM treaty, or promising to take down rogue regimes--is both necessary for the security of a civilized West and something that ensures he will not be appreciated until he is riding off into the sunset. Only then will we quit condemning the methods that brought us security.

The truth is that we live in a global Hadleyville suffering from the delusion that international communications, cell-phones, and the Internet--like the railroad and telegraph before them--equate to civilization. In fact, they are only a thin and flashy veneer atop a wild and savage world where outlaw regimes like North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, and Iran push until pushed back. The United Nations can keep the peace and dispense justice about as well as the territorial marshal who is a three-day ride away or the bought sheriff of a cattle baron's town. And a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein listens to international warnings about as much as Liberty Valance pays heed to the bumbling coward of a sheriff Link Appleyard.

That is why so many people privately appreciate an American Tom Doniphon, Shane, or Will Kane who from time to time appears out of nowhere to stand up to a Saddam, Taliban, or Kim Jong Il--or to the recent crop of bullies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The thugs may think that an exasperated, lame-duck George Bush, suffering from international rebuke and low approval ratings, has dropped his flashy cowboy manners. But they should still beware: If the now-brooding Bush really is a cowboy, he may deal with a few rogues yet, caring not at all for our present approval, but only for his own code of honor and the safety we will enjoy once he's gone. Even the dying J. B. Books took out the bad guys before he and his world were finally over.

Mr. Hanson is professor emeritus of classics at CSU-Fresno, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author most recently of A War Like No Other.