US foreign policy's hubris

Once in office American presidents are often 'susceptible to a utopian temptation'

THE TRAGEDY OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest

Walter A McDougall

Yale University Press

408 pages; $30

On a chilly January morning nearly 16 years ago, my Times colleague Frank Bruni and I went to visit the president-elect of the United States at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. He made us coffee while his dogs barked, and said: “I just don’t understand what Gore was talking about,” referring to the campaign debate about whether the United States should be a “nation builder”. He would not fall into the trap of seeking to change the world, he vowed, when