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If you think our country has engaged in shameful wars of choice, drifted from our Constitutional moorings and generally failed to live up to our self-proclaimed role as the world's guarantor of liberty, you may be right. But which century are you talking about?

According to historian Ted Widmer, a former adviser and speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, the America of lofty ideals about freedom and human rights has always had one stubborn enemy: itself.

Throughout this valuable history of the ideas that have shaped American foreign policy, Mr. Widmer reminds us that the errand into Iraq, which opponents consider a nightmarish aberration, is not without precedent in the nation's history. Our country "always had tendencies working against our best ideals," he writes. "It was never accurate to see America as the embodiment of pure virtue."

Mr. Widmer's sections on the U.S.-Mexican War, which Ulysses S. Grant called "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation," and the Spanish-American War make this case abundantly. Long before the moral ambiguities of Vietnam and Iraq, these episodes showed us capable of going dramatically awry in the difficult task of balancing our power with our virtue, our revolutionary beginnings with the demands of realpolitik.

Mr. Widmer skillfully traces the roots of our perennially conflicted nation, which include the millennial religious thought that pervaded America's early centuries. A country that begins with a belief in a transcendent destiny will at times mistake its own mortal desires for the voice of God. But it may be that the head and tail of this coin cannot be pulled apart. Believing that we possess and protect the ark of the liberties can propel us to greatness, or it can fuel disastrous adventures in imperial overreach.

Mr. Widmer can be a stern critic, but his is not the reflexive America-bashing of a Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky. He makes clear that while America does not always function as that "shining city on a hill" praised by Ronald Reagan, it is equally inaccurate to see us as a vast militaristic, plutocratic cancer threatening the planet.

The author devotes plenty of space to what we've gotten right, tracing a proud and ever-expanding line of development from the Declaration of Independence through the Gettysburg Address, Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, it was FDR who captured the blend of realism and idealism that Mr. Widmer believes represents America at its best.

We have taken a fall over the past few years, Mr. Widmer argues, but then we have farther to fall than countries that lack our democratizing heritage. Claiming a special character and destiny, we must constantly live up to our own high standards. And so the ark sails on.

Chris Tucker (www.ctucker.wordpress.com) is a Dallas writer, literary consultant and commentator for KERA 90.1 FM, National Public Radio.

America and the World

Ted Widmer

(Hill and Wang, $24)

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