Obama believed strenuous diplomacy would prevail

and China, which is shredding international law by turning the world’s most important waterway, the South China Sea, into militarized Chinese territory.

Obama’s policies that brought America to a pinnacle of admiration, as he sees it, were an amalgam of Wilsonian and anti-Wilsonian elements. Wilson’s grand ambition for America was to reorder the world in a way that would make it unnecessary for America to have grand ambitions. He thought America could lead a restful life after strenuous diplomacy had written rules for the game of nations.

Many progressives believe in humanity’s natural sociability. This disposes them to believe that peace among nations is natural and spontaneous, or it would be if other nations would cleanse their minds of the superstitions that prevent them from recognizing the universal validity and demonstrable utility of American principles. These, said Wilson, are shared by “forward looking men and women everywhere” and “every modern nation.”

Obama seemed to doubt that America has much to teach the world, beyond post-Iraq modesty and the power of diplomacy’s soft power to tame the world. Although neither the English nor the American nor the Russian nor the Spanish nor the Chinese civil war was ended by negotiations, Obama thought the especially vicious and complex civil war in Syrian’s sectarian and tribal society could be ended diplomatically. Russian President Vladimir Putin picked a side and helped it win.

The fact that the world is more disorderly and less lawful than when Obama became president is less his fault than the fault of something about which progressives are skeptical — powerful, unchanging human nature.

It causes progressives to furrow their brows in puzzlement. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry was disappointed with Putin, saying, more in sorrow than in anger: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion.”

Kerry’s reprimand of Putin expressed a progressive’s certitude about progress: The passage of time should improve the comportment of nations.

Obama’s foreign policy presumed the existence of “the community of nations.” But that phrase is worse than hackneyed and sentimental, it is oxymoronic: Different nations affirm different notions of justice; a community consists of people made cohesive by a consensus about the nature of justice.

Soon, foreign policy will be conducted by a man who, although in 2010 he said WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange deserves the death penalty, now seems to trust Assange on Russian hacking more than he trusts the consensus of the nation’s $53 billion civilian intelligence institutions. Time passes and, we are told, brings progress.