One of the core questions, policy and philosophical, for domestic as well as foreign policy is what is it each of us does better as individuals and what do we better together? It’s a question worth at least a Sunday night musing after today’s Ryder Cup loss to Europe. All these great individual American golf stars that yet again couldn’t play well as a team. Against those Europeans who we deride as too collectivist, all weighed down by social democracy, yet who do better together than each as individuals.

We also lost in the Davis Cup today. Individual stars like Andy Roddick playing poorly as a team and losing to the Russian team. We lost a few weeks back to Greece in the Basketball World Championships, where even our Coach K couldn’t sufficiently forge a team concept out of guys so used to playing for individual highlight films. We also lost earlier in the year in the World Baseball Championships – the most American of American sports – where the collection of all-stars didn’t gel as a team. Think back to the recent Olympics and how much worse we did in team sports than individual competitions.

The foreign policy links are two.

One is questioning the emphasis on individual freedoms as the core of our model and philosophy in the “war of ideas” to the detriment of what can be done better together than by each on his/her own. This relates to points raised a few days ago about democracy promotion.

The other is about multilateralism and the usual leeriness about international institution memberships and treaty obligations that constrain our freedom of unilateral action. There’s a lot out there that it’s going to take a global community to tackle, not just a lot of Tiger Woods’ and LeBron James’ on their own.