by Jack Hitt et al.

About the author: Jack Hitt is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.

In January 1993, when President Clinton took office, the job of directing “the world’s only superpower” seemed an easy one. The phrase promised a global Pax Americana: history was at an end, what remained to be done was routine police work. That rosy scenario, however, was soon overtaken by events, and the White House, without a compass for the new world, has found itself lurching from crisis to crisis, changing strategies with each set of map coordinates.

Amid the flurry of policy shifts, high-level contradictions, and official “clarifications,” scant attention has been given to the primary questions of American foreign policy: Should our dealings with other nations be governed by Wilsonian moral precepts...