Why are our international peers outperforming us? There are clear, common threads between the education systems of the highest-performing nations. These countries have established uniform, rigorous standards, invested in their teachers and given more time and support to their students.

We need greater expectations and higher education standards. The reliance on computer technology has made math and science more important than ever. Yet by the end of 8th grade, what passes for the U.S. math curriculum is two years behind the math being learned by students in foreign countries. We need modern academic standards that will ensure kids are better prepared for today's workplace demands.

Another area that merits closer inspection is school calendars. Our current academic years continue to be scheduled as if they are straight out of the 19th-century agrarian model, when kids were needed during the afternoons and summers to help perform work around the home or farm. As a result, American children spend less time learning than their foreign peers. If we expect American students to be competitive, then we must find ways to get them more effective classroom time. 

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.

The price of General Motors stock is just one-third of what it was at the beginning of this decade. During this same time period Ford has had three different CEOs. Chrysler has had three different owners since 1998. Nonetheless, executives of all three companies have posed for pictures alongside their latest vehicles, and talked earnestly about how they plan to right their respective ships. If they do manage to do it, they'll owe a big debt to two people who now sit on the sidelines.