July was a horrible month, and August has gotten off to a bad start. And I’m not talking about the weather. 

Practically everywhere we look around the world, U.S. foreign policy is in a shambles. Long-sought objectives – stability in Iraq, peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the demise of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the spread of democracy in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, the end of the North Korean nuclear weapons program, the end of the Iranian nuclear program – seem less attainable today than they have in many years. 

Surveying the wreckage, the American public is frustrated, and fearful. But the headline writers at the New York Times see something more sinister at work: “Americans Showing Isolationist Streak, Poll Finds.” 

Really?

It is hardly surprising that Americans are confounded by international crises that have not been solved — and might have been made worse — by the application of U.S. military power. They are doubly vexed by the incessant demands that this power be deployed in even more places. From the latest Times poll, a majority (56 percent) favored a timeline for the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq and an even wider majority opposed the dispatch of U.S. troops as part of a UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.  

Is it a sign that Americans are becoming isolationists if they believe that the United States should share responsibility for global security with other nations? The NYT/CBS poll found that, by a nearly two to one margin, “Americans did not believe the United States should take the lead in solving conflicts in general.” (my emphasis) Such findings are consistent with trends revealed in a USA Today/Gallup poll from April, in which 46 percent believed that “the United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” A March 2003 poll found only 1 in 3 Americans in the “mind our own business” camp.

This is not isolationism; the belief that the United States can wall itself off from the rest of the world is roundly, and rightly, scorned by people across the ideological spectrum. (For more on this see my colleage Justin Logan’s comments; and Duke University’s Bruce Jentleson, blogging at TPM Cafe’s America Abroad).

Rather, these “mind our own business” sentiments reveal a keen appreciation that even the most powerful nation in the world needs to be more discerning about where, when and how it chooses to deal with challenges to U.S. security and threats to U.S. interests. And yet, even as dissatisfaction with the current course of U.S. foreign policy mounts, Americans are confused as to the available alternatives that would allow the United States to remain engaged in the world. They seem prepared to spend money, and put American troops in harm’s way, when vital U.S. interests are at stake, but they balk at paying those costs, and incurring those risks, when they are not.

This is where bipartisanship should come in. Writing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Stanley Hoffmann explains that one of the prerequisites for fashioning a new foreign policy is “a willingness to break dramatically with the foreign policies of both Republicans and Democrats.” He continues:

Even Democratic critics of neoconservative hubris and critical commentators such as [Harvard’s Stephen] Walt have not put in doubt the need for the US to set the course for its partners and for the world. Nor have the merits of the US being the world’s only superpower been seriously questioned….Those deeply ingrained views…need to be changed. They do not correspond with the realities of power.

It should be possible to assemble an alternative to the Bush Doctrine, one that draws adherents from both the political left and the political right, and all points in between, and that cannot therefore be dismissed by one side or the other as a political ploy.

So long as the opposition remains divided, however, the president seems poised to finish his term in office following the model that guided him during the first six years. Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the 2006 National Security Strategy is its similarity to the strategy put forth in 2002.  

The godfathers of realism, men like Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan, would have been hard pressed to explain the logic behind the Bush Doctrine. Those realists still alive have likewise tried, and failed.

It defies realist theory, but also the lessons of history, to believe that the “unipolar moment” will be anything more than that – a moment. The wise course, realism tells us, is to adopt policies that will allow us to devolve our unipolar responsibilities to a handful of regional powers, capable of assuming the burdens – and the risks – that we have borne almost alone for so long.

Few Americans have read Morgenthau, Niebuhr or Kennan, and they are not likely to do so (for a useful primer, they might look for Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman’s forthcoming book Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World). It is not theoretical models or a deep knowledge of history, but rather common sense that is driving many Americans to search for new approaches to foreign policy. And as the costs mount, and the benefits appear more and more fleeting, we should expect that they will push with increasing assertiveness for the United States to climb down from its perch as the world’s sheriff.