Washington ? U.S. foreign policy now resembles cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s celebrated cover for The New Yorker where the world begins and almost immediately ends on Ninth Avenue, New Jersey looms in the near background and Asia hovers as a microscopic dot on a distant horizon.

Iraq is Ninth Avenue for the Bush administration, draining energy and focus away from every other part of the world. You can understand why. George W. Bush has staked his presidency on the war there.

But most of the Republicans and Democrats out to replace Bush frame their worldviews through the Iraq prism as well. They make the same points again and again without advancing public understanding of what they intend to do about Iraq – or much else – if they win. Positioning on benchmarks for Baghdad is all-consuming.

Reams of speeches and debates, as well as questions from journalists who pursue the candidates down the twisting campaign trail, reflect that Iraqicentric view of the world, with scattered mentions of Iran, North Korea and Darfur.

True, Afghanistan is hailed by Democrats as a just war that serves as a damning contrast to Iraq. But there is little detailed discussion of fitting the struggle for Kabul into a global strategy. There is also attention to climate change, but it is usually focused – again in easy moralistic rather than strategic terms – on the environmental and energy challenges posed by global warming.

A one-dimensional approach to the world raises two dangers for the candidates. The first is that they will be taken by surprise if and when Taiwan’s bid for United Nations membership escalates into an American-Chinese crisis, Russia’s attempt to block independence for Kosovo poisons great-power relationships, or Pakistan implodes with nightmarish consequences for that just war in Afghanistan.

Neither the politicians nor the media are doing enough to look around the corner at crises in the making. They risk being overtaken by events. But there is a greater danger in the positioning of the world around the errors, hubris and covert skullduggery of the Bush administration in Iraq, as undeniably important as the conflict there is.

It is that the next administration will repeat one of the earliest and worst mistakes of the Bush presidency – to throw out everything the preceding administration has done in foreign policy and pretend the world has been born anew on Inauguration Day 2009.

Bush and Condi Rice struggle now to get back to where the Clinton administration left Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Old Europe and New Europe have merged back into just plain Europe. A confrontational White House policy toward Iran is now premised on the hope of driving from power the radicals the policy helped bring to power. And so on.

In its twilight, the Bush administration has made useful adjustments – involving greater cooperation with other nations – that should not be abandoned simply to start again. The North Korea six-party negotiations, conducted masterfully by the State Department’s Christopher Hill, are Exhibit A of this, if you will pardon the expression, late Bushian multilateralism.

With China’s prodding, North Korea appears to have decided now is the best moment to reach a deal with a conservative Republican president who Pyongyang believes can defend that accord against attacks from the GOP right. Such attacks made the 1994 framework agreement with Clinton hard to keep on track.

The White House has also moved toward greater support for United Nations peacekeeping operations, particularly the projected force for Darfur. The limited but positive results of the multinational force dispatched to Lebanon in 2006 shape this new attitude, as does the replacement of Kofi Annan by South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general.

In Asia, a new strategic relationship with India that includes cooperation on nuclear energy should not be weakened or abandoned by Bush’s successor. Bush’s careful handling of Beijing in his second term also looks responsible when compared to the demagoguery about trade deficits that pervades the campaign trail.

Bush is currently trying to discourage Taiwan’s mercurial President Chen Shui-bian from staging next spring a referendum on seeking U.N. membership – just as U.S. primary fights come to a head. In Beijing not long ago, Chinese officials suggested that they would base a potentially bellicose response not only on what Bush says but also the stances taken by mainstream U.S. candidates.

Taiwan, and U.S. support for the island democracy, are two of the subjects I would like to hear a lot more about from those who would wield American power – before they get it.