Let's start with the history. I take it that Lind's postwar model refers to the UN, with the provision for the P-5 members of the Security Council, three of which were democracies and two, Russia and China, were not. That was indeed Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the "four policemen (+ France); he was realist enough, rightly, to recognize that you could not have an international order unless all the great powers signed on. But that was only one plank of the postwar liberal order, as John Ikenberry and many others have argued. The others, were NATO, the Marshall Plan to get Europe back on its feet as a group of democracies rather than watch various European states turn community, and the EU to keep it as a strong economic and political entity. That was the US strategy throughout the Cold War - in keeping with the second half of Kennan's containment strategy, which was to strengthen the West until the Soviet Union collapsed from within. So I honestly don't know how Lind is distinguishing between a "postwar" and a "Cold War" model here.

Against this backdrop, the next question, at least for John Ikenberry and me, who put forward the Concert of Democracies in the Princeton Project's final report, is whether you could not also have a concert of the world's democracies to: 1) deepen cooperation among the world's democracies to tackle many of the vital problems we all indentify to go even further than the UN and regional organizations may allow us to go; 2) strengthen new and fragile democracies (See David Miliband's recent speech on The Democratic Imperative); and 3) engage democratizing countries (which includes China, by China's own self-characterization) in global dialogues about both the nature of liberal democracy and how best to achieve it. In John and my version, we would not support a Concert of Democracies unless it were supported by India, Brazil, South Africa, etc - the whole point is to have a group of democracies beyond the West. And those countries are not going to support anything that alienates China or re-divides the world into democracies/autocracies. Second, we oppose a global NATO, precisely because that would be an alliance that would have to be pointed against some other countries or group of countries. Third, we would design it with some positive economic and other incentives to strengthen the benefits of holding elections and upholding liberal institutions for countries that are already moving in that direction - countries like, say, Fareed's own model of capitalist autocracies in The Future of Freedom.

I don't see any great philosophical divide here. What I see is not enough positive ideas about how the liberal internationalist order of the 20th century can genuinely be expanded and updated to serve the world of the 21st century.

Why did I have such a strong reaction to Dean Slaughter's initial piece? Because in my view American intellectual life, in the public sphere at least, is sbsolutely chocking, gagging, suffocating on patriotism. Patriotism is a legitimate emotion; most of us have affection for the places we're from - nothing wrong with that. But there is surely such a thing as too much patriotism. And in my view, American culture is smothered in patriotism, and emotionally addicted to it, to the extent that it is impeding clear, constructive and broad-minded thinking about other matters.

This is an important point, one that I understand and can sympathize with. Patriotism, like religion, is often turned to bad purposes or used to shield things from scrutiny that should absolutely be scrutinized. But my perception is really that patriotism has been hijacked in American politics, in ways that are very bad for our country as a whole. After 9/11, the reaction everywhere was to fly the flag or wear it on lapel pins. I remember being puzzled by that, as I saw the attacks not simply as an attack on American but as an attack on the West, on an entire value-system that is by no means unique to this country.

So I just don't think that what the world needs now is yet another book on the true meaning of American patriotism, filled with the usual lofty and high-minded rhetoric about capital-L Liberty, capital-T Tolerance, capital-D Democracy etc. I'm afraid my instinctive reaction to the essay was "not more of this!"

The book is aimed both at Americans and foreign audiences. But the subtitle of the book for foreign audiences will be "The Idea That Is America: Reintroducing Ourselves to the World." Foreign audiences will find a very different account of American history than the triumphalist rhetoric they have been accustomed to hearing from us; one that focuses on our frequent failures to live up to our own rhetoric and that points out some of the darkest moments in our history. My discussion of liberty takes its cue from the second verse of American the Beautiful, which ends: "America, America, God mend thine every flaw; Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law." A rather different picture of liberty than the one we are now purveying - one that says we can't ourselves have liberty unless we are prepared to accept the constraints of law, both at home and abroad. The end of that chapter argues, buttressed with the thinking of Truman, Eisenhower, and others, that America has to accept a new set of rules governing the use of force. Each chapter is actually designed to challenge the current understanding of a particular value, or, as in the case of tolerance and humility, to argue that they were central values to our founders but that they have been completely distorted or ignored today, disastrously.

I am frustrated by all of this inwardness because I think those with the education and capacity to understand global issues, and the institutional support to research them in depth and write about them, ought to be writing books that exhort Americans to look beyond their national borders, get beyond debates about national identity, national purpose and national pride, and approach global problems with a practical, cooperative, can-do spirit, without a lot of undue, unnecessary emphasis on where the problem-solvers happen to be from. They need to be told to get beyond their introspective conversations about whether America is this or America is that, beyond their post-Cold War and post-9/11 navel-gazing and wound licking, and just lend a freaking hand! (This goes for left as well as right: too much moping and raging about what's wrong with us can be just as unhealthy as too much bragging about what's right with us.)

This book is intended to be absolutely the opposite of bragging about what's right with us. It does indeed urge Americans to look beyond American. I quote here from my introduction: "this book is about far more than words, spoken or sung. Empty words yield hollow promises, breeding deep cynicism at home and abroad. We must translate our ideals into concrete plans and policies. And we must hurry, because the world is watching and the stakes could not be higher." Each chapter ends with one or two very concrete proposals for what a foreign policy based on what I argue is the meaning of liberty, democracy, justice, equality, tolerance, and humility that I trace through American history would look like.

They should be exhorted, in the words of a couple of great internationalists of the past century, to remember their humanity and forget the rest. They should be encouraged to think more about how much they can learn from the rest of the world rather than how much they can teach it; and think more about ordinary non-special helping rather than exceptional oh-so-special heroism. Exhort them to open up, stretch their necks out of the foxhole, and demand more media coverage of the rest of the world - a community they are part of whether they like it or not. And instead of indulging their native chauvinism and narcissism, let them know they have an obligation to learn more about these things.

I completely agree and it is a message that I try to pound home again and again. From my conclusion:

"Above [a threshold of fundamental human rights], we should be prepared to tolerate national differences with strength and self-confidence. We must be secure enough to listen and learn, to invite other nations and peoples to challenge our versions of universal values just as we question theirs. We must insist on tolerance itself as part of the pantheon of universal values. We should insist that other nations respect the decision of a majority of the American people and of American courts on the legality of the death penalty--a position that we share with Japan, among other liberal democracies. Conversely, we must respect the decision of many other nations to impose limits on hate speech, libel, and the leaking of official secrets; to have an established state religion; and to deny or limit the right of abortion.

Launching and helping to lead such a global debate will make us stronger and safer. We should begin with the stories recounted in this book. If we acknowledge how long it has taken us to make our values a reality for all Americans and recognize that in many places we still have a long way to go, we will communicate immediately that we are willing to engage in a real debate about what these values mean and how they can best be achieved. We will signal that for us, democracy is not some kind of template to be imposed on others, but is instead a system of government that depends on debate and difference."

They should also be told that there is already a gathering global social movement out there that needs intellectual, moral and material assistance, and that it is time for them to join it. Americans on the whole seem to be the last to "get it" as far as the global movement goes. Let history judge which nations were exceptional, and which not; or which nations promoted universal values and which did not. There is no time for that now!

As I have written repeatedly, this book is anti-American exceptionalist, and argues that our founders themselves did not want or expect us to be exceptional for very long. But Dan K is right about a gathering global social movement in the world that the U.S. needs to join. At the end of my chapter on equality, I write:

"The United States and other wealthy countries can do much more to achieve the [Millennium Development Goals]. Most Americans believe that the United States gives far more in aid than it actually does. We currently give a bit more than 0.1 percent of our GDP in official development assistance, about $15 billion per year. Increasing that number to 0.7 percent--the target set by the United Nations--would increase U.S. contributions to about $90 billion and challenge other developed nations to raise their commitments as well.

Many Americans, perhaps most, would embrace these goals altruistically if they knew the real facts. But we need not rely on altruism. Achieving these basic but universal birthrights will be as good for us as for the people we are trying to help. Providing global equality of opportunity, at the most basic level, means providing an opportunity for billions of people to become productive members of society--buying, selling, thinking, building, serving, and caring. Those are the activities that fuel economic growth, for their countries and for ours. These activities also provide societies with the essential infrastructure to address problems of disease, crime, environmental degradation--all the problems that spill across borders and ultimately hurt us. Again, living up to our values also serves our interests, both at home and all around the world.

And we can do more. In absolute dollars, trade is a far more effective way to improve the life chances of billions of people around the world than straight aid. The chapter goes on to spell out precise trade policies we need to adopt.

Could we get some more popular books from American global affairs specialists where the reader might actually wonder whether or not the author was from America? Do these authors all have to make such a show of dropping to their knees, rending their garnments and blubbering in their constitutions as they receive the gifts of the holy spirit Jefferson or Madison? Why do so many of these books have to about the Idea of America, the American Way, the American Path, the American Spirit, the American Experience - America, America, America. Enough! We have heard it all before. There is nothing new under the sun here.

I don't think this is helpful. I recognize that the nature of a book club is that no one has read the book first, so I would not fault Dan K for claiming nothing is new here before reading the actual book. But for me the real question is what can each of us do to try to turn the country around. As I write in the introduction, I wake up these days and read the paper and feel like I am living in a bad dream, and that I increasingly don't recognize the country I thought I lived in, and the country I love, in the world. After teaching a seminar three years ago reading through the Federalist papers and a lot of other founding documents, it struck me that one particular interpretation of our values was being dressed up as the only patriotic interpretation, and that the best way to counter that was to turn to our founders, our poets, leaders, and activists to support a very different interpretation.

I happen to be from New Hampshire. Imagine if every time someone proposed a practical national policy like reforming health care, or reducing the deficit or cleaning up the air, I responded by saying "Yes indeed, because caring for the sick is a New Hampshire value", or "Absolutely, be cause all true Granite-staters believe in fiscal discipline", or "Certainly, because nothing better expresses the New Hampshire value of stewardship, shich is at the same time universal, than caring for the environment." Isn't all this both cloying and irrelevant? Wouldn't my listener (even another New Hampshire listener!) justly complain "Enough already with this New Hampshiremania!"

Maybe. I would have thought that a New Hampshire politician who wanted to convince New Hampshire voters to oppose the Patriot Act, say, would be likely to link such opposition to "live free or die." I come from Virginia. And certainly in Virginia, and most of the American south, if you want to generate popular support for something, going back to Jefferson, Madison, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King and demonstrating that what you are proposing fits with a much longer American tradition and is consistent with our national values will help. Dan K and other readers may lament that, but it is a political fact. Indeed, when I give talks it is often people in the audience from the South and from the military who respond immediately. Before the U.S. can talk to the world in any way that makes sense, we have to convince American voters.

Ending global warming makes obvious sense. Preventing large nuke-packing countries from blowing themselves up makes obvious sense. We don't need a damn permission slip from James Madison or Woodrow Wilson!

If the business of government, either domestically or internationally, were only about finding and selling policies that make sense, this country, and the world, would be in a very different and far better place.

Let me respond to three principal points. First, David’s description, and suspicion, of my book as a “progress narrative.” For a second I thought I was back at Harvard Law School, where many of my critical legal scholar colleagues and students would shake their sophisticated heads and cluck at my naïve progress narratives as a liberal international lawyer. It’s hard for me, as a woman who grew up in a solidly segregated Virginia at a time when women with opinons, much less brains, were definitely suspect, to look around and see two women and one African-American secretaries of state over the past decade and the first African-American and women candidates for president with a real shot at making it and not believe in some kind of progress. Over our history, slavery did end; women did get the vote; the civil rights movement did make enormous strides, even if we still have a long way to go. What is certainly true, as I try to point out, is that our history is certainly NOT a linear progression, and for every triumph there are many defeats. One of the central points of the book is that our founders did not believe in some kind of special American virtue; they thought, as Madison wrote, that we were no more angels than any other men (and women), which is precisely why we needed checks and balances to counter our faults. What David always fears most, legitimately, is that if you let Americans (or anyone else) focus on the positive we will forget the negative. That is the point of his book A Bed for the Night on humanitarian intervention – nothing we do is ever simply, uncomplicatedly good, but if we took his view completely we would never actually try to do anything.

David’s second point, which many other commenters make and Bruce touches on, is what this book will look like to non-Americans. I certainly agree that if non-Americans were to read only the discussion of the book here, they would think it is a naïve, triumphalist celebration of all that is good about America. But David’s Latin American friends would probably be agreeably surprised to read, in my chapter on liberty,

“America quickly deprived Spain of its colonial possessions, taking Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and Guam and the Philippines in the Pacific. Briefly, it seemed as if the United States was acting according to its belief in self-determination, liberating smaller nations from the yoke of colonialism.

But then the liberators stayed. Of the four “freed” colonies, only Cuba was given nominal independence, and even then, the United States inserted a clause into the Cuban constitution allowing America to intervene whenever it deemed appropriate. The other three islands were made effective colonies of the United States—though never officially described as such—and served as important bases for the expansion of U.S. naval power, particularly in the Pacific. In the Philippines, we used force to maintain control over the island nation, our troops fighting the same patriotic Filipinos we had previously assisted in their struggle against the Spanish. As the American flag rose above foreign lands, the irony was palpable: A war justified in the name of liberty was revealed to be an imperialist bid for power.”

I go on to talk about the anti-imperialist league, which included Mark Twain, and their largely vain efforts to point out the hypocrisy between our own founding and what we were now doing. In the chapter on humility I describe “our long and tangled history” in Latin America and some length and note: “Despite our pious claims against European imperialism, the United States intervened militarily in Latin America thirty-seven times in the forty-two years between 1890 and 1932, a policy we called gunboat diplomacy.” I describe the Hoover-Roosevelt good neighbor policy as at least based on mutual respect for Latin American nations, as an example of what a foreign policy consistent with humility would look like.

Third, the issue of American versus universal values. I chose the excerpt I did because in a previous exchange in the International Herald Tribune David had accused me of being an American exceptionalist; I wanted to make clear that I do NOT think that Americans are in any way unique for forging our national identity based on a set of fundamental principles. What I argue repeatedly throughout the book is the our founders did not think we were unique, but only blessed to be able to be the first nation to prove that a political system could be organized to secure enlightenment values. I cannot put this better than Oleeb did in his comment on David's first post: “Slaughter's assertion that the basic American values she writes about are universal is, more than anything else, an expression of the fundamental liberal/Lockean position that such things are the natural rights of human beings, and that they are "self evident". This is the root and basis of American political thought and government and the values she discusses are essentially those fundamentals the 18th century founders asserted despite not having attained them all by a long shot.” What is important today about recalling that they are universal – or, more precisely, that America was founded on the premise that they are universal – is that it means we must understand our own experience as just one dimension of a global experiment in trying to secure those values – the liberal democracies that I list are just some of the many others that interpret these values according to their national traditions, cultures, politics and develop different political systems to attain them. That is a very different and, I argue, much better premise on which to engage the world.

More later. Thanks particularly for the comments by Ben Bartlett, Mimi Katz, Codegan, Monkey Boy, Rain39, aMike, the one from John Haber where he talks about the value of our ideals if they could lead us to dismantle Guantanamo, and the one from Matt Steinglass on the Music Man. To some others, I know this is the blogosphere, so civility is irrelevant, but where does some of this vitriol come from? What did Rachel or I ever do to you? And sorry, Ellen, I’m afraid that I really am from Princeton.

Americans are hardly unique in having forged a national identity based on a set of fundamental principles. The French glory in their country’s heritage as the source of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” The English rightly love their tradition of individual rights and restrained rule begun with the Magna Carta. The Chinese venerate many of the principles of Confucianism as part of the bessence of being Chinese. South Africans celebrate ubuntu, the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects humanity. Indeed, a journalist’s story about the near destruction of a fabled Baghdad street of booksellers in the late summer of 2006 closed with a heart-wrenching description of the last bookseller to remain open breaking down in tears. “Iraq,” he said, as he wiped his eyes, “it is the first country. It set the laws of Hammurabi.”

But values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche for a unique reason: Although we inhabit a common land that we love, we do not share a common race, creed, or national origin.

Debates and struggles over the meaning of our values have driven our history forward. Democracy once meant suffrage only for propertied white men. At the dawn of the Revolution, liberty meant slavery for 20 percent of the population. Equality once meant segregated schools. And justice has often not been for all. Successive groups and generations of Americans have challenged the meaning and the implementation of these values—calling on our government to make good its promises and also disputing precisely what was promised.

We are a strong and vibrant nation because we have different views about what our values mean in practice. Our disagreements generate extraordinary political energy and fuel our social and civic engagement. These debates have propelled us forward through nearly four centuries of American history, and they will animate our nation for centuries to come. And as we have done in the past, we will undoubtedly reverse ourselves periodically in the future. The balance between order and liberty, for instance, is continually being redrawn as we face new internal and external threats.

The sum of all these debates is the great American debate, the essence of our politics, the secret of our historic success, and the source of our strength as a vibrant, open society. But to safeguard and build on that strength, we must be mindful. We must conduct our debate within both substantive and procedural limits. As broad and deep as our national debate is, our values do not have limitless meanings. Substantively, our values can mean many things, but our history shows there are some things our values cannot mean. Liberty cannot mean slavery; democracy cannot mean disenfranchisement; justice cannot mean the denial of habeas corpus or one’s right to see the evidence against oneself. Somewhere along the spectrum of grays, black becomes white. The exact location of that point is itself a matter of debate, and as every lawyer knows, drawing lines in these circumstances is always an imperfect exercise. But lines must be and can be drawn, by our courts, our legislators, and us as participants in shaping public opinion. The lines we draw define the zone of legitimate difference, of tolerance, of robust debate.

We need not only to embrace a vigorous national debate on what we stand for, but also to launch a global debate about the meanings and trade-offs of universal values. Liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith bind Americans together, but these values do not stop at the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, or the banks of the Rio Grande and Saint Lawrence. We have always insisted that our values are universal values. Indeed, part of what we think makes us distinctively American is that we hold to a set of values that apply around the world.

Today, other countries, by and large, do not believe us. When we say, “We want to promote universal values,” they increasingly hear, “We want to impose American values.” We have enemies in the world—from terrorist groups to governments trying to keep a hold on power by demonizing us—who deliberately amplify this message. But even many of our friends in the world think that we no longer listen or learn, but that we instead insist that the American way is the only way. To change these perceptions and to get our foreign policy back on track, we have to face and answer hard questions about why we make the trade-offs we do, and when and whether we are practicing what we preach. We must also accept that other nations might have equally valid understandings and applications of values that they understand to be theirs just as much as we see them as ours. That is the meaning of universal values.

Engaging in this debate means asking ourselves some tough questions. The countries of the European Union do not practice the death penalty. Do they have the right to lecture us on the death penalty? If not, do we have the right to lecture Islamic countries on the practice of cutting off a hand for thievery? Suppose a majority of citizens in a particular Muslim country support the practice?

Under French law, Muslim girls may not wear head scarves in schools. Is that a violation of freedom of expression or freedom of religion, an infringement of the core value of liberty? If not, then why it is permissible for us to insist that Amish children attend school until at least eighth grade? Or for us to ban prayer in schools? Citizens of other countries looking at America could offer many other examples.

If we sincerely believe that our values are genuinely universal, that it is “self-evident” that all humans have the same basic endowments and all are entitled to self-government, then we must learn much more about how other nations implement our shared values. We need to learn much more about the idea that is Japan, France, South Korea, India, South Africa, Germany, Botswana, Ghana, Brazil, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, Italy, Australia and a great many other liberal democracies. Genuinely engaging the citizens of these countries in a global debate will help us see ourselves as others see us—an easy way to gain both friends and humility, not necessarily in that order.

Not surprisingly, we disagree on both counts.

"Americans show a strong preference for Congressional candidates who would seek to increase multilateral cooperation. Seventy-two percent say they would prefer candidates who believe that "the U.S. should do its share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries." Much less popular are candidates who want the United States to "continue to be the preeminent world leader" (9% support) or to "withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems" (16%)."

The White House Project, which supports women candidates across the political spectrum, has found in its polling that the message that resonates the most strongly with security-minded voters is a message focused on international cooperation: "Real security for our communities, our nation, and our world requires a new kind of leadership--women and men who realize that we can't solve the world's problems alone." And finally, consider the finding of the most recent poll conducted by Public Agenda together with Foreign Affairs, which introduced a new "anxiety indicator" to track the country's overall level of anxiety about foreign affairs. The indicator stands at 130, well over the neutral baseline of 100. According to Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich. "It's not just one event or one specific policy that is worrying people-it's Iraq, it's the danger of a terrorist attack, it's energy dependence, it's our diminished reputation around the world, it's the rise of violent Muslim extremism. People see the country in trouble on multiple fronts."

All of that says that voters are not only ready for, but that they want an approach to national security that goes well beyond the war on terror. They see Iraq as a huge issue, but not the only issue. It also says that they are ready for a message that says we have to address all the threats we face in cooperation with other nations. They understand that international institutions are not traps that are going to constrain our sovereignty and force us to take on all the world's problems, but rather engines of cooperation and burden-sharing in taking on the global challenges we can't avoid. As long as those institutions work.

That is exactly the prescription of the Princeton Project. The U.S. has to build an infrastructure of capacity and cooperation, one capable of taking on many threats and once and harnessing the energies of as many nations as possible, together with the private and the citizens sectors, to face these threats together. That framework is captured in the one overarching concept of liberty under law - a concept that has two more words than containment, true, but is nevertheless simple enough and powerful enough to communicate to voters.

Liberty under law is woven into the fabric of our own history. Bruce Jentleson just sent me the following quote from an article by Robert Conquest in the 2005/2006 winter issue of The National Interest:"'Democracy' did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged. Habeas corpus, the jury system and the rule of law were not products of 'democracy,' but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English exec. And democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from and is an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition."

That is the way we should be trying to build strong, prosperous societies abroad under the rule of law. Equally important, liberty under law was the key to our success as an effective global leader in the 20^th century. As our presidents knew from FDR to George H.W. Bush, for America to establish order and liberty among nations, we had to accept that international law applied to us as well as to our allies and rivals.

President Bush's campaign slogan in 2004 was "freedom is on the march." What the world has seen since is that freedom without order is chaos. And order without law is tyranny. America cannot stand for liberty without also standing for law, both at home and abroad. And we can't stand for law without obeying it ourselves, both at home and abroad. But if we take liberty under law as our standard, and mean what we say, we can once again stand tall in the world and find many partners in helping reform and build institutions that will make us both stronger and safer.

Second, that democracy promotion means focusing on elections. Steve claims that “liberty under law” is just a euphemism for Bush-style democracy promotion. Liberty under law instead emphasizes that democracy is not an end in itself, that it is rather a means to the establishment and preservation of ordered liberty – a society in which all individuals have sufficient liberty and sufficient order to pursue their own visions of the best life for themselves and their children. Democracy based on a foundation of sufficient prosperity, education, and institutions designed to check and balance power is the best means of achieving that balance of liberty order yet found by humankind. If that is not so, then the onus should be on Steve and similar critics to offer an alternative.

That is the core of my disagreement with Anatol’s ethical realism as well (see the recent debate on BloggingHeadsTV) – I’m all for pursuing a strategy of economic engagement, but what do we do when a government takes a sharp turn for the worse in its treatment of its own people to hang on to power in the face of liberalizing forces? Realists of any stripe immediately argue that liberals want to intervene because of their bleeding hearts and their ideals, ideals that then get us into worse trouble than just staying out. But it’s not ideals that drive John and me and other liberal internationalists. It’s interests. Interests that say over the long term America will be stronger and safer in a world of liberal democracies. And interests that say that when governments turn on their own people they are one step away from creating major trouble for their neighbors and for the regional and even international system.

Third, and most important, that a desire to promote democracy, liberty, justice, equality, tolerance – the values underpinning successful liberal democracy anywhere – means the promotion or imposition of American values. There are many reasons why people around the world may assume that today, which is one of the great failures of this administration’s foreign policy and to some extent Clinton’s foreign policy. If we cannot get past that premise, then it means that we as Americans have lost our own heritage. These are genuinely universal values. That we have promoted them so disastrously under George W. Bush and to some extent under Clinton (remember the international criminal court – hard to say we stand for justice when we seem to want justice only for others) as well means indeed that the rest of the world increasingly sees our promotion of these values as nothing more than a blind for the imposition of American power. But we as Americans must reject this equation and put our money where our mouths are in our international decisions, rather than accepting it and lobbing it as an accusation against different groups in American internal debates.

It’s one thing to say that they are universal values and that we should promote them but that America as a nation is so tarnished that we taint everything we touch. If that is Steve’s position, then the question is whether and how to redeem ourselves. That is where John and I look to international institutions, not as laundering devices but as places and mechanisms where we can in fact practice what we preach and act collectively. But if Steve’s view – and that of many of our other critics on the far left – is that these are NOT universal values, but only American values, then we need a much deeper debate about who we are and what we stand for as a nation.

Alternatively, perhaps ignore the rise of China and India? Is Steve, the neo-realist and offshore balancer of power, telling us that we should not make the greatest geopolitical shift of power in two centuries a priority? Energy security? Without energy, the U.S. has no power. Global pandemics? At one of the last Princeton Project meetings in Washington two leading traditional national security experts, one of whom has just published the book Hard Power, were busy debating whether global warming or avian flu posed the greatest threat to the American way of life. One little viral mutation, and all of us will by lying awake at night trying desperately to figure out how to protect our children.

Our point is that old think – prioritize a few threats and focus on those – just won’t do. This is not exactly a radical thought, except perhaps to traditional national security thinkers. Fortune magazine recently wrote a piece about how Bill Ford stepped down with the admission that Ford’s business model just didn’t work any more. Fortune observed, “Ford’s lament is the signature cry of our age. Across sectors—retailing, brokerage, software, publishing, computers—business models that produced profits for decades have shut down. In most cases managers aren’t sure what the new model will be, but they’re absolutely certain it won’t have a multidecade lifespan.” In a world in which information flows so fast and so fully and dramatic change can happen overnight, placing a few big bets is the fastest way to go out of business altogether. That is why we argued for turning to an interest-based strategy, one that identified the resources, the people, and the infrastructure that we will need to address any of these threats quickly and effectively, and to set about building it based on a calculus of maximum impact and multiple use. That may not look like the kind of strategy that folks like Steve and Dan recognize, but welcome to the 21st century.

What Steve wants as a strategy is something that looks like: containment, engagement, hegemony, or off-shore balancing. That is what he defines as “grand strategy.” As I pointed out in my first post, we went looking for that kind of a strategy and concluded that it simply could no longer do the job. But if he needs a one-word label, we would define ours grand strategy as order-building – both within and among nations – building an order that is legitimate and that allows and empowers actors within states and states themselves to harness their collective capacity to meet whatever threat dominates the agenda. To create that kind of an order requires both protecting liberty and upholding the rule of law, backed by force if necessary. Steve and Dan may not like that strategy, but it is a strategy.

Steve, however, hears “liberty under law” as nothing more than a “euphemism” for democracy promotion, and he and Dan and Peter all equate democracy promotion with the promotion or even imposition of American values on the rest of the world. Those are exactly the kinds of equations we sought to challenge and undo, but that is for my next post.

Which brings me to today's news. North Korea's actual or claimed test of a nuclear weapon makes the central point of our report more strongly than we ever could.

From the Executive Summary of Princeton Project on National Security Final Report:

In the first decade of the 21st century the United States must assess the world not through the eyes of World War II, or the Cold War, or even 9/11. Instead, Americans need to recognize that ours is a world lacking a single organizing principle for foreign policy like anti-fascism or anti-communism. We face many present dangers, several long-term challenges, and countless opportunities. This report outlines a new national security strategy tailored both to the world we inhabit and the world we want to create.

Objectives: The basic objective of U.S. strategy must be to protect the American people and the American way of life. This overarching goal should comprise three more specific aims: 1) a secure homeland, including protection against attacks on our people and infrastructure and against fatal epidemics; 2) a healthy global economy, which is essential for our own prosperity and security; and 3) a benign international environment, grounded in security cooperation among nations and the spread of liberal democracy.

Criteria: To achieve these goals in the 21st century, American strategy must meet six basic criteria. It needs to be: 1) multidimensional, operating like a Swiss army knife, able to deploy different tools for different situations on a moment’s notice; 2) integrated, fusing hard power—the power to coerce—and soft power—the power to attract; 3) interest-based rather than threat-based, building frameworks of cooperation centered on common interests with other nations rather than insisting that they accept our prioritization of common threats; 4) grounded in hope rather than fear, offering a positive vision of the world and using our power to advance that vision in cooperation with other nations; 5) pursued inside-out, strengthening the domestic capacity, integrity, and accountability of other governments as a foundation of international order and capacity; and 6) adapted to the information age, enabling us to be fast and flexible in a world where information moves instantly, actors respond to it instantly, and specialized small units come together for only a limited time for a defined purpose—whether to make a deal, restructure a company, or plan and execute a terrorist attack.

FORGING A WORLD OF LIBERTY UNDER LAW

America must stand for, seek, and secure a world of liberty under law. Our founders knew that the success of the American experiment rested on the combined blessings of order and liberty, and by order they meant law. Internationally, Americans would be safer, richer, and healthier in a world of countries that have achieved this balance—mature liberal democracies. Getting there requires:

Bringing Governments up to PAR: Democracy is the best instrument that humans have devised for ensuring individual liberty over the long term, but only when it exists within a framework of order established by law. We must develop a much more sophisticated strategy of creating the deeper preconditions for successful liberal democracy—preconditions that extend far beyond the simple holding of elections. The United States should assist and encourage Popular, Accountable, and Rights-regarding (PAR) governments worldwide.

To help bring governments up to PAR, we must connect them and their citizens in as many ways as possible to governments and societies that are already at PAR and provide them with incentives and support to follow suit. We should establish and institutionalize networks of national, regional, and local government officials and nongovernmental representatives to create numerous channels for PAR nations and others to work on common problems and to communicate and inculcate the values and practices that safeguard liberty under law.

Building a Liberal Order: The system of international institutions that the United States and its allies built after World War II and steadily expanded over the course of the Cold War is broken. Every major institution—the United Nations (U.N.), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—and countless smaller ones face calls for major reform. The United States has the largest stake of any nation in fixing this system, precisely because we are the most powerful nation in the world. Power cannot be wielded unilaterally, and in the pursuit of a narrowly drawn definition of the national interest, because such actions breed growing resentment, fear, and resistance. We need to reassure other nations about our global role and win their support to tackle common problems.

However, it is clear that America can no longer rely on the legacy institutions of the Cold War; radical surgery is required. The United Nations is simultaneously in crisis and in demand. Its structures are outdated and its performance is inadequate, yet it remains the world's principal forum for addressing the most difficult international security issues. America must make sweeping U.N. reform a political priority. Necessary reforms include: expanding the Security Council to include India, Japan, Brazil, Germany, and two African states as permanent members without a veto; ending the veto for all Security Council resolutions authorizing direct action in response to a crisis; and requiring all U.N. members to accept “the responsibility to protect,” which acknowledges that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from “avoidable catastrophe,” but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the international community.

While pushing for reform of the United Nations and other major global institutions, the United States should work with its friends and allies to develop a global “Concert of Democracies”—a new institution designed to strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies. This Concert would institutionalize and ratify the “democratic peace.” If the United Nations cannot be reformed, the Concert would provide an alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action, including the use of force, by a supermajority vote. Its membership would be selective, but self-selected. Members would have to pledge not to use or plan to use force against one another; commit to holding multiparty, free-and-fair elections at regular intervals; guarantee civil and political rights for their citizens enforceable by an independent judiciary; and accept the responsibility to protect.

The United States must also: revive the NATO alliance by updating its grand bargains and expanding its international partnerships; build a “networked order” of informal institutions, such as private networks and bilateral ties; and reduce the sharply escalating and politically destabilizing inequalities among and within states that result from the generally beneficial process of globalization.

Rethinking the Role of Force: At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force. Instead of insisting on a doctrine of primacy, the United States should aim to sustain the military predominance of liberal democracies and encourage the development of military capabilities by like-minded democracies in a way that is consistent with their security interests. The predominance of liberal democracies is necessary to prevent a return to destabilizing and dangerous great power security competition; it would also augment our capacity to meet the various threats and challenges that confront us.

America must dust off and update doctrines of deterrence. The United States should announce—preferably with its allies—that in the case of an act of nuclear terrorism, it will hold the source of the nuclear materials or weapon responsible. We must also ensure that our deterrent remains credible against countries with different strategic cultures and varied military national security doctrines. And we must find ways of deterring suppliers of nuclear weapons materials from transferring them—deliberately or inadvertently—to terrorists.

America should develop new guidelines on the preventive use of force against terrorists and extreme states. Preventive strikes represent a necessary tool in fighting terror networks, but they should be proportionate and based on intelligence that adheres to strict standards. The preventive use of force against states should be very rare, employed only as a last resort and authorized by a multilateral institution—preferably a reformed Security Council, but alternatively by the existing Security Council or another broadly representative multilateral body like NATO.