In the second half of the 1970s, the task for those not busy flinching from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was to understand why America failed in Indochina and the implications of this failure—how, notably, America should conduct itself among what then came to 170 sovereign nations. We got it wrong, the honest among us said. Now what do we do?

I have always counted those years an exceptional passage in the American story. Self-examination of that kind does not come often to our republic. The only other such interim I can recall, a much briefer break from our incessantly shrill triumphalism, followed the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. Then, too, a few of us asked similar questions. Why? What had we done? What do we need to do differently?

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