Jerry Springer, who died this past week at the age of seventy-nine, might end up being remembered for being a lot of things: the disgraced city councilman who paid for sex with a check; the Cincinnati mayor with a social conscience who once said, “if a man has five bucks that he wants to use to take his wife to a movie, but there’s a poor person out there with a real need . . . it’s a legitimate function of government to reallocate that man’s entertainment money to help out the poor”; the daytime TV talk-show king who was accused, not unfairly, of later exploiting those same people for ratings and entertainment.

What he’s not likely to be remembered for is the little-known 2004 Dolph Lundgren movie The Defender.

That’s too bad. Because while The Defender isn’t anyone’s idea of great cinema, today it’s a fascinating artifact from the George W. Bush years. The film is a rare cultural product that didn’t just sound the alarm about the dangers of Bush’s presidency or the “war on terror” — it dared to suggest that the entire foundation of that war and how it was fought was backward, and then full-throatedly endorsed a nonmilitary alternative.