The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran – suggesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government is not an imminent nuclear threat – will undercut some of the tough-talking foreign policy positions staked out by most of the Republican presidential candidates. Still, Democrats must beware, because the American people, inclined toward hawkishness since Sept. 11, will be suspicious of too-eager doves.

In the meantime, the seeming stand-down with Iran brings back memories of past presidential elections, won and lost.

I worked for George H.W. Bush in both his successful 1988 election campaign and his unsuccessful 1992 re-election campaign – and what a difference the passage of four years made.

In ‘88, the Cold War was obviously winding down, but plenty of voters still worried, rightly, about the Soviet Union. During that campaign I was proud to watch and listen as then-Vice President Bush answered national security questions from reporters and from citizens. His calmness and precision made me feel safe, and, more to the point, it made the voters feel safe. Bush could be trusted near “The Button.”

Over the next four years of the Bush presidency, the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR broke up. No more Red Menace. In addition, Bush brilliantly managed Desert Storm in 1990-91; he was skillful enough to assemble an international coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but he was wise enough not to chase him all the way to Baghdad. The result: America was peacefully supreme by 1992.

Alas, the voters did not reward Bush in 1992, because they had moved over to domestic concerns, where Bush was considerably weaker. In that bread-and-butter election it didn’t matter that the challengers, Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot, didn’t have any foreign policy-making experience, or that Perot was, frankly, eccentric. Cold War concerns about readiness and steadiness had evaporated.

So paradoxically, if Bush had been less successful in foreign policy – if the Cold War had continued, if the Kuwait crisis had somehow stretched out – the 41st president would have been better able to argue, “Re-elect me, because you need someone with experience to keep an eye on the Russian bear, and that nogoodnik Saddam Hussein.”

Instead, Bush suffered the same fate as Winston Churchill back in 1945: Win the war, lose the next election, as the voters look to the future, not the past.

And, of course, in the next two elections, 1996 and 2000, forei gn policy was barely an issue. Then came Sept. 11, and once again a Republican president named Bush held the national security high cards. The anti-terror hand worked well for him in his 2004 re-election, although not so well in the 2006 midterms.

But now, with Iraq in post-surge remission and Iran seemingly off the table – and assuming that nuclear-armed Pakistan doesn’t come completely unglued – the 2008 election is likely to share the same let’s-focus-on-the-home-front mind-set. Indeed, the next presidential election might be a lot like 1992. And that’s bad for the GOP.

Yet, at the same time, the Democrats are not immune from falling into losing patterns, either. The Democratic leadership in Congress, for example, seems heavily invested in the proposition that we have “lost” the war in Iraq. It would be foolish to say “mission accomplished,” and yet the American people don’t want to lose.

So the sense that the Democrats are defeatist could be toxic to donkeys next year. That was the bleak fate of the party’s Civil War-era nominee, George McClellan, back in the 1864 presidential election. And it happened also to George McGovern in the Vietnam election of 1972.

Oh, one last thing: Who really thinks, down deep, that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons? We don’t know exactly when the Iranians will get The Bomb, but then, of course, we never do. The Soviets took us by surprise when they tested their nuke in 1949.