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There's a grim list. There is a very deep undercurrent on the Left that insists that America must be humbled, brought into line with internationalist and socialist ideals. That produces an enormous blind spot with regard to such pumped-up little tyrants such as Chavez and Ahmadinejad, who will happily replace the ideologically-based accusations of hegemony with the real thing. To an academic looking at the whole thing from the outside there's no difference; to the political prisoners being dumped in mass graves there's a world of difference.

Moral equivalency has always been able to cloud that difference by sticking strictly to a discussion of principle. There is, if one squints hard enough, no difference to be discerned between a man killed as collateral damage during our assault on Saddam and 300,000 murdered by his secret police. "It's all the same thing." It isn't, of course, but if one attempts to run a foreign policy on the basis that it is, one gets the inchoate hash that is 0bama's foreign policy.

The real problem is that in publicly making a major objective of foreign policy "to improve America's image in the world" one places the premium on public relations rather than results. Image in whose eyes? Would that be a foreign press and cultural elite imbued with the same ideals? Surely the circular futility of this is obvious, but not, presumably, to the participants.

The result is an America that will not defend freedom but will happily fill the air with the same gooey platitudes as those who have concerns other than freedom, and no intention of defending it. It's a step forward for celebrity and airy vacuity, a step backward for actual civilization.