About the author: James Chace is editor of the World Policy Journal.

Whatever happened to the moral center of American foreign policy? When Bill Clinton was elected, he appeared to be trying to balance realism with morality. But he never presented a strategy of what that would mean concretely for United States foreign policy. The president said during the campaign that he believed that “no American foreign policy can succeed if it slights our commitment to democracy.” Yet that is precisely what has happened in Bosnia: we slighted our commitment to democratic ideals by allowing one country, Serbia (or one faction within it), to impose its will on another, Bosnia. In Somalia, we declared that our intervention there was for humanitarian reasons, but when warring factions were...