The air in Washington is thick with cries of "isolationism"--principally directed by President Clinton against his Republican adversaries. But while understandable politically, those charges are wrong historically. Isolationists haven't been a major political force in this country since World War II. The real post-Cold War debate will not be between isolationism and internationalism but between two versions of internationalism identified with two great American presidents--Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. It is Wilsonianism that is in trouble, not internationalism.

Woodrow Wilson believed that America should transform international politics rather than engage in it. The goal of American foreign policy, he explained, was "the creation of a universal dominion of right." Such a world would be governed by international laws and arbitration boards. A moralist rather than a strategist, Wilson believed America had interests in every corner of the globe. "Nothing that concerns humanity," he said, "can be foreign or indifferent to us."

Wilsonianism is an inspiring but impractical way of looking at the world. When Wilson tried to sell his grand scheme, the League of Nations, to his own countrymen in 1919, they balked. The Senate properly reasoned that membership in the League would mean that the U.S. could be drawn into a war without the sanction of Congress. When the League was tried in Europe, it failed. What later rescued Europe from tyranny was not Wilson's collective security system, but rather old-fashioned balance-of-power politics. A decade after Wilson's death, Wilsonianism was a failed ideology.

But the Cold War turned foreign policy into a moral struggle that could end only in a total victory for one side. American foreign policy was properly aimed at the transformation of the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union was not a normal great power playing by normal rules. This peculiar situation meant that Wilsonianism fit nicely with U.S. foreign policy.

Now the Cold War is over. The U.S. is still the strongest nation in the world, but it cannot transform every regime it dislikes. The Clinton administration's initial attempts to conduct foreign policy along Wilsonian lines, and the failure of that effort from Bosnia to China, has led to the realization that America cannot implement a Wilsonian policy.

This may return us to an older tradition of American statecraft forged by Wilson's great rival, Teddy Roosevelt. The world in which Roosevelt came to power in 1901 has many things in common with the world today. It was characterized by peace among the great powers and an ever-widening zone of liberty. Even some of the specifics were the same: a rising Japan in the East, a newly unified Germany in Europe, and a Russia obsessed by its internal troubles. Economically, America, then as now, was the greatest of the great powers, with 20%-25% of world economic output.

TR's great challenge was to bring the U.S. onto the world stage. He believed that America, like Britain before it, had to play a role as an offshore balancer, ensuring that the crucial power centers of the world -- Europe and East Asia -- stayed peaceful and prosperous and did not fall prey to any one power. Thus, he brokered a peace in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, in which neither side triumphed.

Roosevelt believed, above all else, in national power. He dismissed the possibility of "establishing any kind of international power . . . which can effectively check wrong-doing," and he regarded as "abhorrent" the "Wilson-Bryan attitude of trusting to. . . all kinds of scraps of paper without any backing in efficient force."

TR believed that the maintenance of ready power was not just a useful tool but a great deterrent. "The most important service that I rendered to peace," he once explained, "was the voyage of the battle fleet round the world." Roosevelt also believed that America was a special country and that its foreign policy should help promote its principles. He did not, however, believe that this could be accomplished by a moralistic foreign policy. He never made threats or promises he would not honor. Recall his famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

In a sense, Roosevelt had greater confidence in American ideals than Wilson did. Roosevelt believed that the progress of civilization was ongoing, that "History" was on his side. The greatest service the U.S. could do to promote liberty in the world was to ensure great power peace and the resulting spread of prosperity.

At the turn of the 21st century, as at the turn of the 20th, the U.S. must conceive of a foreign policy that first and foremost protects its interests with power, not paper. It must continue to promote American ideals but without messianic crusades, which are unnecessary and expensive. More is gained, for example, by creating a climate in which a country moves uneasily toward greater economic and political freedom than by hectoring its regime to release a handful of prisoners. The latter is certainly a more rewarding experience psychologically, but the former is the more sober form of idealism.

Thus, Teddy Roosevelt's conception of America's place in the world provides the most sensible guide for American foreign policy in the future. It is a post-Cold War internationalism that America needs and can well afford.

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