Anne-Marie Slaughter (Princeton - Woodrow Wilson School) has published The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic Books 2007). Here's the abstract:The Idea That is America reminds us of the essential principles on which our nation was established: liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith. These are the values that have shaped our history and that bind us together as a nation. We have struggled to make them real, through the civil rights movements for women, African-Americans and other minorities; through campaigns for religious tolerance and tolerance of wave of immigrants; through demands for voting rights and equal protection of the law; and through the steady surge of reform and resistance that defines our democracy. When we seek to promote and support these values in the rest of the world, we must be honest about these struggles and about our own imperfections. We have much to learn from other nations as well as to teach.
American needs a values-based foreign policy that is true to our actual values. The Idea That Is America offers a set of foreign policy proposals that meet this standard and that provide a roadmap for getting our nation back on track in the world. We as a nation cannot afford to give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.
