The final report of the Princeton Project on National Security—just released under the title Forging a World of Liberty under Law—is a lot like U.S. foreign policy itself. It is well-intentioned. It is hugely ambitious. It gets some things right, and is couched in a rhetoric designed to maximize its appeal here at home. And like much of American foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats, it is flawed. It takes for granted the universal appeal of America’s liberal ideology, and assumes that most of our problems will vanish once the rest of the world adopts these principles.

To be sure, many elements of the report should command ready acceptance (at least here in the United States). The report correctly rejects the Bush’s administration’s militarized unilateralism and calls for the United States to employ many instruments of power in order to achieve its goals. It offers a more sophisticated analysis of international terrorism than the Bush administration has, and emphasizes treating terrorist networks largely as criminal enterprises rather than as military rivals. It recognizes the importance of sustaining an open world economy and calls for collective action to address global problems of public health (including pandemic disease) and environmental degradation (including global warming). Although many of its prescriptions hew close to the conventional wisdom, a few recommendations—such as a proposal for an immediate 50 cent/gallon gas tax—are almost bold. So most readers will something here to like.

That said, reading the entire report is disheartening, because it shows how little American liberal internationalists have learned over the past decade or more. Although the authors of the report are implicitly critical of the Bush administration’s disastrous combination of hubris and incompetence, the report reminds us of the extent to which liberal internationalists have been the de facto enablers of many of Bush’s mistakes. Why? Because liberal internationalists and neoconservatives share many of the same core beliefs. Both groups think American power is almost always a force for good, and both believe that most states (and especially most democracies) should welcome the energetic use of American power. Both liberals internationalists and neocons think the U.S. should use its power to spread democracy (or to use the Princeton Project’s new euphemism, “Liberty under Law”). Both see authoritarian governments and human rights violators as great evils, and think that the United States should use its power to get rid of the former and punish the latter. Both groups dislike weapons of mass destruction (and especially nuclear weapons), except in the hands of the United States and its friends. Given these points of agreement, it is hardly surprising that many liberal internationalists endorsed the neocons’ adventure in Iraq. The only significant difference is that liberals strongly support international institutions—which they see as critical to a stable “world order”—and neoconservatives don’t, because neocons see institutions as potential constraints on American power. If the neoconservatives are essentially liberals on steroids, then liberal internationalists are just kinder, gentler neocons.

True to its liberal internationalist roots, Forging a World of Liberty under Law (hereafter FWLL) portrays a world brimming with vast problems. The first sentence says it all: “On the fifth anniversary of September 11, the world seems a more menacing place than ever.” The United States “feels increasingly alone in the world,” and it faces “many present dangers.” One page later, we are told that “A national security strategy for the 21st century must address all the dangers we face—diffuse, shifting and uncertain as they are—and seize all the opportunities open to us to make ourselves and the world more secure.” In other words, the world is filled with troubles, and it is our job to get out there and fix them.

As a result, FWLL offers a breathtaking array of imperatives: Here’s a partial list, along with a few side comments of my own:

And on the seventh day, presumably we will rest. This is only a partial list of FWLL’s recommendations, and it is hard to imagine any administration achieving—or even Ii>attempting—more than a handful of them. The list partly reflects the collective nature of this sort of report—once you recruit several hundred participants, you are bound to get a lot of log-rolling and special pleading for different pet proposals--but the end result isn’t a strategy. Developing a strategy requires setting priorities and making hard choices among different goals. This is always hard for liberal internationalists to do, given their tendency to see all problems as interconnected, and their belief that Americans really do know what’s best for others and really do know how to solve all the world’s problems.

Alert readers will have also noticed some striking similarities between the “Bush Doctrine” and FWLL. In his Second Inaugural, President Bush said that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” FWLL says we must “secure a world of liberty under law.” Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy spoke of a “balance of power favoring human freedom”; FWLL speaks of a “balance of power favoring liberal democracies.” The 2002 National Security Strategy was skeptical of deterrence and emphasized preventive war; FWLL correctly resurrects deterrence but also endorses preventive action against “extreme states,” albeit only as a “last resort” and only if we can get approval from the Security Council, or “some broadly representative multilateral body” (presumably of our own choosing, like a “coalition of the willing”). There’s a bit of daylight here, but not much.

Viewed as a whole, FWLL illustrates liberal internationalism’s faith that the spread of democracy (or “liberty under law”) will mitigate most of our problems and encourage broad acceptance of an American-centered “world order.” It might, but the record to date isn’t encouraging. FWLL proposes that we create a “Concert of Democracies” to advance the liberal ideal, and calls for other liberal powers to contribute more to the combined strength of this new coalition. Unfortunately, being democratic does not guarantee that other states will want to follow the US lead—remember the deep divisions over Iraq—and the more capable other democracies become, the harder it will be for the United States to exert leadership over them.

The report also portrays “institutions” as the preferred solution to a wide range of international problem. Whenever and wherever problems arise, it says we should build, create, nurture, reform or revitalize an institution. This view misstates what international institutions can and cannot achieve. The academic literature on institutions shows that they can be a useful tool of statecraft, and that they help states achieve common interests in the face of temptations to cheat or free-ride. In this sense, the liberal internationalists’ support for institutions like the UN makes much more sense than the neoconservatives’ aversion to them. But institutions cannot get powerful states to ignore their own interests, and they are not particularly good at resolving significant conflicts of interest when they arise. The Middle East is not conflictive because it lacks institutions; rather, the Middle East lacks institutions because conflicts among and within these societies have been too deep and intense to allow effective institutions to be built.

In touting the virtues of institutions, FWLL also assumes that any order we build will be acceptable to others. Thus, it begins its discussion on China by saying that our “primary task is to manage the Sino-American relationship in such a way that China can continue to achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order.” The current order is largely one of our making, however, and I suspect China’s leaders (and its people) will have some ideas of their own about their “legitimate ambitions” and the proper design of an “international order.” It also calls for the U.S. to strengthen a regional order that is “trans-pacific. . .in which the United States plays a full part.” Presumably the authors will have no objection if a more powerful China insists on playing a “full part” in the Western hemisphere at some point in the future.

Finally, by prescribing a National Security Strategy where the United States continues to be responsible for all global problems and has to do most of the heavy lifting, FWLL will keep the United States on a path where we are more likely to betray our principles than to spread them. By encouraging the US to continue trying to run the world, FWLL ensures that we will continue to generate resistance in far-flung places. Sometimes that resistance will take the form of a stubborn nationalist autocracy, as in Milosevic’s Serbia, Hussein’s Iraq, North Korea, or Iran. Sometimes it will take the form of a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda. We will always be tempted to solve such problems by using force—because we think it is our right and our obligation to do so—and sometimes we will succumb to that temptation. When we do, we will end up dropping bombs and launching cruise missiles onto people who may not have attacked us, or we will end up trying to occupy and govern some foreign population that we do not understand. And when we do that, we will probably face violent resistance, and we will end up torturing prisoners and committing other human rights abuses, because that is what occupiers do. Not because we mean to, of course, but because it is very, very hard to avoid.

The more we try to run the world, and the more resistance we generate, the more that others will try to strike back at us. When they occasionally succeed, we will conclude that we really do face a hostile world, and our leaders will decide that some of our own freedoms much be sacrificed to keep us safe.

There is a link, in short, between America’s self-proclaimed role as “leader of the free world” and the preservation of our liberty, but it is not the link that President Bush (and FWLL’s) suggest. They both think the energetic promotion of liberty abroad is essential to preserving our liberty at home. But the opposite argument is more compelling: the harder we try to force others to become like us, the more we shall place that freedom at risk. If the President can wage preventive war because he has (or has cooked up) some worrisome intelligence information, then it is a small step to incarcerating people without trial because he says he has some information that leads him to suspect them too. While he is at it, why not tap their phones and emails because they have foreign-sounding names, or because they traveled to Egypt last summer, or because they have a subscription to The Nation and attended a Dixie Chicks concert? Such worries sound far-fetched, of course, but how many of us would have predicted Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib a few years ago? I am certain that Ikenberry and Slaughter would be horrified by such policies and would oppose them vehemently, but the foreign policy they are recommending will encourage the further concentration of Presidential power, and gradually jeopardize “liberty under law” here at home.

Let me emphasize that I am not arguing for a retreat to Fortress America, or for an abandonment of America’s core principles. As I argued in my book Taming American Power, it is in the U.S. interest to preserve its current position of primacy for as long as it can, and it should remain engaged with allies and friends around the world. It would also be desirable if more countries become democratic, largely because they are less likely to abuse their own populations if they do. But the United States can best accomplish that task by setting a good example, and that is where we are visibly failing. Overall, we can best promote our security and our values through a strategy of “offshore balancing,” intervening abroad only when there are large and direct threats to vital U.S. interests. Instead of trying to solve all the world’s problems, the United States should play “hard to get,” and force other states to pay a high price to gain our support. Paradoxically, the United States will be a lot more popular—and a lot more effective—if it stops trying to do everything itself.

But that wise course is unlikely—at least for awhile—because the United States remains very powerful and is still convinced of its own rectitude. It is very hard for a country like ours to resist the urge to remake the world. FWLL approvingly quotes Henry Kissinger to just that effect; in his words, “the war on terror is not the ultimate test of U.S. foreign policy, which is, above all, to protect the extraordinary opportunity that has come about to recast the international system.” This is as clear an example of hubris as one might ask for, and as long as our leaders define U.S. foreign policy in this way, Americans had better get used to disappointment.