By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, February 7, 2002; Page A25

President Bush followed last week's galvanizing speech to the nation denouncing "an axis of evil" with proposals for defense spending increases that would make the United States a military colossus without equal in human history. It is a bold grab for authority to transform a nation and a world that Bush had been expected to manage, not command.

His State of the Union message and the unveiling of the security-centered high-deficit budgets that will hang over his first term and beyond are a joint statement of mission and determination that will stir doubts and resistance along a broad front at home and abroad. Much of the noise will be just that. But not all the misgivings can be dismissed.

The increase that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seek for next year at the Pentagon is $48 billion -- an amount that is 150 percent of the annual defense budget of France, the second largest spender in NATO. The proposed defense budget of $379 billion will lift U.S. defense spending to about 40 percent of the total that all nations in the world spend on their militaries, according to some estimates.

Friend as well as foe will be left behind on another military planet if the new U.S. dollars translate into new defense capability, as Rumsfeld promised in testimony to Congress on Tuesday. The war speech given by Bush paved the way for the war budget described in detail by Rumsfeld a week later. Hopes abroad that the former was mostly rhetoric were vaporized by the latter.

The serious program the president laid out on Jan. 29 will require serious spending and military planning to implement. Without using the words, he committed the United States to a policy of preemptive strikes against hostile nations that develop biological, chemical or nuclear weapons and have links to global terrorism.

His description of Iraq as such a state was detailed and well thought-out. The president seemed most intent on settling the debilitating debate within his own administration about the feasibility of and need for military action against Saddam Hussein. Bush deliberately gave the impression of using his words to launch a sustained planning and training effort for U.S. forces in helping Hussein's foes topple the Iraqi dictator.

Iran and North Korea were also singled out as points of darkness on the axis of evil. But Bush did not dwell on them, as he did on Iraq. He paid tribute to "the Iranian people's hope for freedom," which is being frustrated by "an unelected few." There is still time and room for change in Iran, his words suggested, that would avoid a direct collision.

Europe responded with dismay to Bush's rhetoric. The axis of evil reference was denounced as too threatening to the two Islamic states, which can supposedly still be tamed with reason and business contracts. But that concern is misplaced. The immediate tactics Bush has adopted are sound.

It will not be possible to deflect Iran from its drive to obtain weapons of mass destruction as long as Saddam Hussein's deadly regime is in power next door. Iraq must be dealt with first, in the context of an eventual return to normal U.S. relations with Iran. And pressuring the "moderate" forces in Iran and their supporters into trying to wrest the power they have won in democratic elections away from autocratic mullahs may well produce greater results than would quiet, acquiescent diplomacy.

In pursuing differing tactics, the Bush administration and its European partners must take care to prevent Iraq and Iran (or North Korea for that matter) from becoming symbols in a broader disguised debate over the ambitious U.S. political program of global command that emerges from the war speech and the war budget.

The immediate post-Afghanistan focus must be kept on Baghdad and the threat to global stability the regime there poses. Russia, France and other countries seemed tempted to make the Iraq issue one of American hegemony in world politics rather than of Hussein's brutality and treachery. That would be a dangerously misguided approach.

The Bush administration can reduce the temptation by doing a better job in explaining both at home and abroad how the huge defense spending increases it seeks for this year and the future will underpin America's traditional alliances -- rather than hollow them out. Congress has a crucial role to play on two fronts: It should ask tough questions in its defense budget hearings about strategy and the philosophy of leadership as well as technical details. And it should make sure Colin Powell gets the modest 4 percent increase he has requested for the State Department's bare-bones budget.

In Don Rumsfeld's new budget, dollars and computer chips are what iron and blood were to Bismarck: the decisive elements of warfare. But they are only building blocks for what must be a shared global effort at turning back the forces of disorder and, yes, evil.