Perhaps it is in light of the Logan Act that White House Press Secretary Dana Perino emphasized, “The president believes that if president Carter wants to go, that he is doing so in his own private capacity, as a private citizen, he is not representing the United States.” It is all well and good for the White House to distance itself from the behavior of Jimmy Carter, but there is a limit to how far any American government can go in condemning the actions of a former president.

The station of ex-president carries a diplomatic heft, and no one has used it with more inelegance and opportunism than Jimmy Carter, whose sabotage of American foreign policy has not been limited to Republican presidents (see Bill Clinton and North Korea). By calling on the United States to include Hamas in peace talks, and by meeting with the leader of said terrorist group in the capital of a country with which the United States does not even maintain diplomatic relations, Carter undermines a crucial plank in America’s Middle East policy.

NATO endorses President Bush's plan for missile defense in Europe despite Russia's objections. A nervous Europe goes along. For Moscow, this is a case of deja vu all over again. If you saw the headline, "Russia to U.S.: Drop Missile Defense," you'd be forgiven if you thought someone had left a 1986 newspaper laying around. That's what former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev said to President Ronald Reagan when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev, like Putin today, demanded we drop SDI. Reagan refused.

Bush, even hampered by a Democratic Congress, is making missile defense a reality. We shudder at the prospect of a President Obama scrapping Reagan's dream in favor of his "aggressive personal diplomacy" with Tehran and Moscow. A President Obama would have supported the nuclear freeze and lost the Cold War.

A President McCain, however, would carry on Reagan's grand strategy in dealing with America's enemies -- we win, they lose. 

In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself -- and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends -- like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.

Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?

But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.

McCain's robust attitude towards those who would threaten the security of America might have caused some friction among Washington's European allies, but nothing approaching the scale achieved by Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

It will be eight months before we know whether McCain's second run for the White House has been successful, but he has made it clear that his presidency would be very different in tone and substance from that of Bush.

Apart from adopting a more practical, less ideological approach to the war on terror, McCain has indicated he would be prepared to be more conciliatory on other key international issues, such as the threat posed by global warming. After meeting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, McCain declared that he was confident "we can reach a global agreement that would include China and India. It's a compelling issue for the world's environment and I am committed to it."

The envoy who finally stood up and said the right thing wasn't Chris Hill, who has spent the past year purveying the bizarre calculus that as long as the U.S. keeps its side of the bargain in the Six-Party talks on North Korea, we’re half way to success. It was Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for human rights in North Korea.

Lefkowitz spelled out that after four years of Six-Party talks, we’ve got pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test, a nuclear test, and continued brutalizing its own people in ways “deeply offensive to us,” which “should also offend free people around the world.” That speech later disappeared from the State Department's website.