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Whether a nation is democratic should be of less concern to us than how it views America. In the Cold War, autocratic Pakistan was a better friend than democratic India, which sided with Moscow in the Afghan war. Chile's Pinochet was a better friend than the elected demagogue Salvador Allende.

Other examples follow (notably the Europeans who didn't support us in Vietnam), but stop right there and hold those lines in mind as we turn to the beginning of the next paragraph:

"The form of governments nations adopt is their own business."

First, consider the language. The vagueness of "The form of government nations adopt" nearly slides right by. Nations are the people who constitute them, and governments are not "adopted" but are either chosen by vote or imposed by force. Certainly Chileans didn't "adopt" our good friend Augusto Pinochet; he seized power after his countrymen, tending to "their own business," elected Salvador Allende. Thus we can assume that for Buchanan, a nation's choice of government is not always just its own business.

He admits as much:

When we say a nation is democratic we say only that its leaders reflect the will of its people. Would Americans be better off with regimes in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait that better reflected the will of the Arab street? ... Of the Persian Gulf nations, perhaps the most "democratic" -- if voter approval and popular support are our yardstick -- is Iran.

Again, pay attention to the language. If a democratically elected government is repugnant to him, it's a "regime." The popular will of Arab peoples is "the will of the Arab street," a phrase designed to invoke images of rabble-rousing anti-American rallies. (That Iran may well be the most democratic Persian Gulf nation is surely why its leaders are finding it harder and harder to hold to the Islamic hard line as Iranians press for a more democratic system.)

I'll concede Buchanan's point that "voter approval and popular support" don't always result in a more democratic society. Certainly the voter approval and popular support for Buchanan's idol, Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies concentrated the bulk of the national wealth among a tiny minority of citizens, didn't result in a more democratic nation. And you'd be hard pressed to find anything in the poll figures Buchanan cites for the years 1939 through 1941, showing that a majority of Americans opposed entering World War II, that does credit to the notion of democracy.

It is, of course, Buchanan's view of World War II that has provoked the firestorm over this book and caused Sen. John McCain to accuse him of slurring the memory of every American who fought and died in the conflict.

Briefly, Buchanan's take runs something like this: Since Hitler's ambitions were to restore the land taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and to extend Germany's empire into Russia, he presented no danger to the United States or to Britain. But Neville Chamberlain's Britain -- humiliated when Hitler broke his word and invaded Czechoslovakia -- then issued a guarantee of protection to Poland. Hitler's invasion of Poland propelled Western Europe into the war, and Hitler was forced to respond "to secure his rear before invading Russia," the country whose conquest was his ultimate aim. Thus, Europe bought Stalin two extra years to strengthen his army and prepare for Hitler's attack. The final outcome of Britain's guarantee to Poland -- and thus of such episodes of stunning courage as the Blitz and Dunkirk -- was to secure Eastern Europe for Stalin:

Had Britain and France not given the guarantee to Poland, Hitler would almost surely have delivered his first blow to Stalin's Russia. Britain and France would have had additional years to build up their air forces and armies and to purchase, as neutrals, whatever munitions they needed from the United States. If the revealed horrors of Nazism in the East mandated a war, the allies could have chosen the time and place to strike. Even had Hitler conquered the USSR at enormous cost, would he then have launched a new war against a Western Europe where his ambitions never lay? Had Britain and France not given the war guarantees to Poland, there might have been no Dunkirk, no blitz, no Vichy, no destruction of the Jewish populations of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, or even Italy.

Notice that Buchanan doesn't mention the destruction of the Eastern European Jews or of Hitler's myriad other Eastern European victims. The Eastern dead are the acceptable expenditures for keeping the United States out of the war.

Again and again, Buchanan tells us that Hitler's only aim was the conquest of the Soviet Union. How does he know this? He has Hitler's word on it, from "Mein Kampf": "If we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states." He quotes Hitler in August 1939 -- "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia" -- oblivious to the irony that 12 days after this statement, Germany and the Soviet Union announced their nonaggression pact. So much for Hitler's word.

But it isn't only Hitler's word that Buchanan is willing to accept at face value. He also has confidence in the Führer's rationality. A successful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would have come, as he observes, at enormous cost to Germany; does he think that cost would have sated the hunger for conquest of a man who said, "I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence"? What if Hitler had been able to replenish his arms by plundering Soviet weapons, to swell his armies by forcing Russian soldiers into the German ranks? And why should we assume that, had Britain withheld its guarantee from Poland and remained outside the fight, a Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe would not have been a threat?

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