The doctrine of "liberal interventionism" which impels free nations to do what they can to liberate the populations of countries ruled by corrupt totalitarian regimes has been well and truly (if not necessarily permanently) discredited by the Bush administration...
Along with the countless old diplomatic hands who have been muttering (or proclaiming to any journalist they can find) the same message, he assumes that it was that doctrine - or even "idealism" in foreign policy itself - that failed in Iraq, when in fact the peace was lost because of stupid strategic errors and the arrogance of certain individuals.
There was nothing inherently unrealistic about the project of removing Saddam: that objective was indeed, carried out with startling efficiency. Nor was it wildly "idealistic" - in the pejorative sense of naively over-optimistic - to believe that a country that has always had a highly educated political class might be able to organise itself into a constitutional recovery.
Well, it didn't happen. Or at least, it hasn't happened yet, as much because of other global players whose machinations were disastrously underestimated by Washington as anything else.
But where does this leave the fundamental breakdown in understanding between America and much of Europe (whose view Britain is moving to adopt) about the moral responsibilities of free nations?
For that is what this is about in the end. And, absurdly, it is just those people - Mr Cameron himself, for example - who talk about our moral mission to cure global problems such as starvation and child poverty in the developing world, who now seem to want to give up on the one remedy for those problems that has proved to be effective.
The cure for mass poverty and the political criminality that it breeds is a combination of liberal democratic government and free market economics. To be aware of that truth and yet refuse to disseminate it must be as wicked as withholding Western drugs that can cure Third World diseases.
And it will not do to dismiss some peoples, with post-colonial contempt, as "unready". The only way that people learn how to deal with freedom is to exercise it. To say that they must win it for themselves without outside interference is to ignore the terrifying effectiveness of modern tyranny, with its armoury of weapons and electronically comprehensive surveillance.
The real rupture between the American perspective and the European one lies deep in their political histories.
The American Declaration of Independence, which is embedded in the consciousness of every school child in the US, begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
All men are created equal, and are all endowed with unalienable rights. The 18th-century concept of "natural rights", which makes political freedom the birthright of every human being wherever he resides, is central to America's view of the world.
US citizens do not get their right to be free by courtesy of the government: their government exists by virtue of acknowledging the citizen's unalienable right to liberty. Americans have always been obliged, long before George Bush, to uphold the rule that the only legitimate government is one that rules with the consent of a free people.
Naive? Inconsistent with America's own patchy history of selective support for dictatorship? You bet.
But the note of purity is still there: it is what Americans believe themselves to stand for and why they can rise to the occasion of a Kosovo while cynical, defeatist Europe dithers.
We cannot disagree with this. Those so-called progressives who would deny to others the freedoms they themselves enjoy are guilty of moral cowardice. Janet Daley is surely right to attribute America's historic attachment to this cause to the origins of that extraordinary nation: forged from political, religious and economic refugees, adventurers, idealists and slaves, the United States continues to this day to live by its creed of "self-evident truths", notwithstanding the cynicism and disdain of those in Europe and elsewhere who consider themselves more "realistic". We, on the contrary, take the idealistic view: we reject the narrow selfishness of those who believe that freedom begins and ends at home; we believe in the truth and efficacy of our liberal-democratic system of government; we hold true to the values of the Enlightenment that the false progressives of our time would betray. Liberal interventionism - the liberation of the unfree by the free - is the moral mission of our age. It is our mission.
The New Party News