[Arthur Herman is the author most recently of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age.]

Among the first duties of the Obama presidency, all agree, is the restoration of America’s standing in the world. Poll after poll has shown how unpopular America is overseas, from London to Damascus to Beijing. Nor is there much disagreement as to the reason. As Fareed Zakaria puts it in The Post-American World, the reason is the “arrogance” displayed by the Bush administration—an arrogance that has blinded Americans to the fact that they can no longer push other nations around at will, and that their country now inhabits a multi-polar world.

The bill of particulars is by now drearily familiar. In the Middle East, Bush’s war in Iraq not only overstretched our military but radically alienated the UN and our European allies and undermined our position as an honest broker elsewhere, particularly on the issue of Palestinian statehood. Further damage to the American image was wrought by Bush’s refusal to abide by the Kyoto protocols on global warming, by the scandals over Abu Ghraib and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, by the recklessness of our handling of Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons, by our needless provocations of Russia over missile defense in Eastern Europe and our encouragement of Georgian adventurism. All in all, to listen to Bush’s myriad critics, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had it just about right in assailing “the arrogant course of [an] administration which hates criticism and prefers unilateral decisions.”

Hence the air of expectancy hovering around the Obama presidency, the sense of a new era dawning and a more hopeful direction taking shape. Obama’s own formulation of that hopeful new direction appeared last summer in an essay in Foreign Affairs. “The American moment is not over,” wrote the then-candidate, “but [it] needs a new burst of visionary leadership.” Promising a definitive end to the Bush doctrine, whose serial abuses had made the world lose “trust in our purposes and principles,” Obama foresaw an era of “sustained, direct, and aggressive diplomacy” that would rebuild America’s alliances and deal successfully with global threats ranging from terrorism to climate change.

America’s other important foreign-policy goal, Obama wrote, was reducing global poverty: the root cause, in his view, of terrorism and political extremism around the world. By “sharing more of our riches to help those most in need,” by building up the social and economic “pillars of a just society” both at home and abroad, America could bring security and stability to the entire world—if, he added, the task were undertaken “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner—a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”

In short, instead of being the world’s swaggering policeman, America would become the world’s self-effacing social worker. The sentiment is hardly unique to Obama; it was a point of virtually unanimous agreement among those competing with him for the Democratic nomination. Specifically, it was the view of Hillary Clinton, his arch-rival and now his nominee as Secretary of State. In her own Foreign Affairs article (November-December 2007), she, too, blasted the Bush administration for its “unprecedented course of unilateralism,” which had “squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends.” And she, too, promised a new start, focusing on international cooperation and multilateralism, exhausting every avenue of diplomacy before resorting to military action, “avoiding false choices driven by ideology,” and devoting our resources to problems like global warming and third-world poverty. If pursued sincerely and consistently, such a course, she was confident, would keep us safe, restore America’s image, and win the respect of the planet.

Or would it? For a little historical perspective, it might be useful to look at the last President who embraced exactly the same analysis of America’s foreign-policy problems and enacted exactly the same strategy for resolving them.

“The result of the 1976 election,” Michael Barone writes, “was Democratic government as far as the eye could see.” After the debacle of Vietnam, Jimmy Carter entered office determined to clean up America’s image abroad. Abetting him in his endeavor was the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress by a substantial majority, while Republicans were broken and dispirited. Much as with Obama and his team today, the basic operating assumption of the Carter team was that U.S. assertiveness abroad, or what Senator William Fulbright called America’s “arrogance of power,” had become the primary source of international tension. It was time for a humbler, gentler posture: the post-World War II Pax Americana was over, discredited by Vietnam, and so were the cold-war assumptions on which it was based.

From Carter’s point of view, the United States could win the world’s trust again by helping to shape a more equitable international order. The polarities dictated by the U.S.-Soviet conflict had grown stale; the cold war itself had become increasingly irrelevant to the future of the planet, to what the Thomas Friedmans of that day were beginning to call “the global village.” Instead, the emerging division was between rich and poor, between the developed and the developing worlds.

In words eerily foreshadowing those of Barack Obama decades later, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would become Carter’s national security adviser, wrote in Between Two Ages that the future tasks of foreign policy lay not with the “political” issues of war and peace but with the “human issues” of poverty and development. Washington’s “preoccupation” with “national supremacy,” Brzezinski declared, would have to yield to a global perspective—a perspective that, in another parallel with today’s arguments, many then thought peculiarly well suited to America’s lowered status in a world featuring such exciting phenomena as the rise of the “non-aligned movement” and the Third World. Above all, in Brzezinski’s view, Americans had to understand that using military force to shape the course of events, as we were disastrously trying to do in Vietnam, was not the cure but rather the cause of international crises; an America that hoped to be on the right side of history would have to learn to be less assertive.

As for the Soviet Union (concerning which Brzezinski happened to be a hawk), Carter himself intended to dispel what he would famously describe as our “inordinate fear of Communism.” Toward that end, he would proffer a hand of trust to a Moscow understandably suspicious of American imperial designs. This would eventuate in his proposing and signing a far more comprehensive arms-control agreement than Richard Nixon’s SALT I. It would also entail decreasing America’s military footprint around the globe, as in South Korea, where Carter felt that the presence of American troops hindered a peaceful unification of the peninsula. He even contemplated giving direct aid to the victorious Communist government in Vietnam.

How did all this work out in practice?..

[Avi Shlaim is an Iraqi-born British historian. In addition to a professor of International Relations at Oxford University, Shlaim is the author of many books including The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace.]

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by"an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation....

As George W. Bush leaves office, more articles have been appearing on the issue of his legacy. Journalism, of course, is known as the first draft of history, and the consensus has been offered: Bush was the worst President in American history. This assessment began a few years ago, when he was less than half through his second term, and was begun by Princeton University’s eminent historian, Sean Wilentz, who wrote two different cover stories for Rolling Stone arguing his case.

Most recently, Time columnist Joe Klein, in a particularly nasty and vitriolic [1] article, argued that torture and related “war crimes” is “the real Bush legacy.” As Klein sees it, the treatment of enemy prisoners in wartime- those of al-Qaeda and the Taliban-was not only “callous and despicable,” but “stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his residency.”Klein is perhaps the strongest example of a partisan journalist whose left- leaning bias color his ability to objectively evaluate the record of the outgoing administration.

In an evaluation from the other side, Jay Lefkowitz, [2] writing in Commentary, shows that Bush, “despite the absence of any tangible political benefit to himself or his party,” created the most effective and expensive American project to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, and that he did so “at the risk of a costly break with one of his core constituencies.” Lefkowitz provides the details in his article. But unlike Klein, he says it will be years or decades before any consensus can emerge about the Bush presidency.

But now, some liberal journalists are stepping back and although they have been strong opponents of Bush’s policies, have belatedly acknowledged that there were times even Bush did the right thing. In Sunday’s Washington Post, Peter Beinart, formerly editor of The New Republic and now a fellow at The Council on Foreign Relations, [3] writes, “It is no longer a close call. President Bush was right about the surge.” In fact, Beinart concludes: Bush’s “decision to increase America’s troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour.” “It would have been far easier to do the opposite,” and Bush “endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated.” Beinart concludes, “He was not only right; he was courageous.” (my emphasis.)

Beinart calls on Democrats to publicly acknowledge this for their own future credibility. It is dangerous, he cautions, for young Democrats to believe that “the right is always wrong.” In fact, he notes, during the Persian Gulf war of Bush 41, Congressional Democrats opposed it and Congressional Republicans supported it, and the “the Republicans were proven right.” On welfare reform, he also adds, liberals predicted disaster, and “disaster didn’t happen.” Today, “liberal self-confidence is sky-high,” and it is too easy for his side to fall into sneeringly dismissing all conservative critics. “No one political party, or ideological perspective,” he concludes, “has a monopoly on wisdom.”

Beinart’s view seems to be in line with the apparent pragmatism and centrism of the incoming Obama Administration. Faulting the Bush administration for not taking liberal critics seriously on issues like regulation and unfettered American might, Beinart seems to be making a case for listening to all arguments, and for putting ideology aside.

Complementing Beinart is the Post’s own [4] editorial, “Mr. Bush Exits.” Although the WP editors fault Bush with his erroneous post-invasion policies, Guantanamo and with the policy of torture, they give credit to Bush when credit is due. In Iraq, they write “there is a decent chance of a reasonably pro-American incipient democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East. This would be a major accomplishment, and one that would cast the invasion, the failure of the early years of occupation and the painful loss of more than 4,000 American lives and many more Iraqi lives in a different light than the one in which they are seen by most Americans now. It would also vindicate his unpopular decision to stabilize Iraq with more U.S. troops rather than abandon it to civil war and possible genocide-an instance in which Mr. Bush’s self-assurance and steadfastness paid off.”(my emphasis.)

On the issue of AIDS in Africa and his insistence that tyrannies must move towards democracy, their editorial continues, George W. Bush “put the United States firmly on the side of democracy and freedom, arguing, correctly, that the transformation of dictatorial regimes is, in the long run, necessary to peace and security.” The editors fault him for not always living up to his own standards, and not moving quickly enough against the Putin’s government’s drift to authoritarianism. And when Obama moves to close Guantanamo, they caution, he will find that it is not so simple a matter, since a “significant number of those detained there would try to attack America if released.”

That some liberal sources of opinion have, in the very last days of the Bush Administration, tried to make a more balanced assessment is cause for hope. As a historian, I believe that any final judgment about the Bush years must be put off for at least a minimum of ten years, when we can see how things work out in the future, and more records of the administration are made available. Indeed, it is foolish for historians to echo commentators who make firm statements about how history has proved Bush to be evil incarnate. Similarly, I think it foolish for conservative historians to issue contrary assessments. Let history have its say, when time passes and the passions of the moment subside.

There’s been a Kennedy in the Senate since 1952, but events this week suggest this era might be coming to a close. Caroline Kennedy informed Gov. David Paterson that she has taken her name out of contention to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as senator from New York. Sen. Ted Kennedy, suffering from brain cancer, was taken from the celebratory lunch on Inauguration Day; his medical prognosis is uncertain, at best.

Many pundits had expected Caroline Kennedy to get the appointment. After all, she is a Kennedy. When Kennedys have sought a political position, they have usually been victorious.

The Kennedy family has been a powerful force in national politics since the New Deal. The first Kennedy to emerge on the national scene was Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., who made his name in the Democratic party of Massachusetts and who was named chair of the Securities Exchange Commission by FDR. His son, John F. Kennedy, was elected senator in 1952 and then president of the United States in 1960. (Rose, JFK’s mother, was a Fitzgerald, and her father, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had been a member of Congress from Boston, elected in 1895, and mayor of Boston, elected in 1906.) Though JFK was assassinated in 1963, his short-lived presidency caused many young Americans to think about politics in inspirational terms and to consider how they could contribute to civic life.

“The irony is that one of the most conservative presidents we have had in the White House might have struck the most devastating blow to the family that has come to embody American liberalism for over half a century. With Bush, the cost of dynastic politics became clear.”

JFK's brother Robert served as attorney general in his administration, guiding the White House through heated standoffs over the racial integration of southern universities and helping his brother navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis. RFK began as an ardent Cold Warrior, but by 1968, as the senator from New York, he stood as the champion of younger Americans who were tired of the Vietnam War and demanded that the government deal with social problems such as urban racism. Like his brother, he was struck down by an assassin; he was killed in 1968 just after winning California's Democratic primary and was headed to the Democratic convention in Chicago.

Senator Edward Kennedy struggled with many problems early in his career, including his failure to immediately report a car accident on Chappaquiddick Island on Martha’s Vineyard that resulted in the death of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Following an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1980, Senator Kennedy emerged as a major voice of liberalism in the conservative era. Kennedy was unrepentant in challenging the Bush administration on every issue, from Iraq to the minimum wage, even when most other Democrats were timid before the once-popular president....

[Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. He is author of the books, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.]

At the request of President-elect Barack Obama, President George W. Bush convened an awkward meeting of all living former presidents at the White House to meet, and presumably give advice and encouragement to, the new guy. The body language of the participants in the summit photo, taken in the Oval Office, said it all.

The president-elect was amiably chatting with George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Could it be that Obama was complimenting the elder Bush on his “realist” foreign policy—of which the president-elect claims to be a fan?

Right next to these two political lovebirds were another harmonious duo. Also visibly enjoying each other’s company were the modern-day champions of U.S. military interventionism on the left and right—Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Clinton was a Wilsonian liberal who was the titleholder in terms of numbers of military adventures, most of them for ostensibly “humanitarian” reasons. He intervened militarily or threatened to use force in Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and North Korea. The younger Bush, a neoconservative (a right-wing Wilsonian), was the champion in terms of deeply enmeshing the United States in two unnecessary nation-building quagmires simultaneously—Iraq and Afghanistan.

Standing apart from the others in the summit photo—and looking mighty uncomfortable—was Jimmy Carter. Could it be that the interventionism, actual or professed, of all the others made him a little squeamish? While not perfect, Carter—in keeping with the original vision of the nation’s founders—exhibited more restraint militarily than the rest. Although he began giving aid to the Afghan Mujahadeen, his objective was to annoy the Soviets and give them another Vietnam. (Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor, later opened the floodgates to massive aid, tried to win the war, and thus much more significantly enabled a future threat to the United States.) Carter’s only overt military foray, which ended in failure because of the incompetence of the U.S. military, was the attempted rescue of U.S. hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran. Even this mission exhibited restraint; when the hostage-takers stormed the U.S. embassy, under international law this action was the same as attacking American soil. Although Carter could have conducted a retaliatory military assault against Iran, he correctly surmised that the diplomatic hostages would have been killed. Although the rescue mission failed, the hostages were eventually freed without the United States having made any concessions to their captors (unlike the macho Ronald Reagan’s astonishing sale of heavy weapons to this same radical Iranian regime, which was a state sponsor of terrorism, to ransom U.S. hostages in Lebanon).

Carter is the most underrated modern president—in fact, he usually gets bad reviews. Yet people have trouble remembering many specifics about why he was so awful. You cannot have prosperity and liberty if you are always at war. Whereas other recent presidents have seemed oblivious to this fact, the Vietnam experience seems to have made Carter realize it. Carter consciously used military power reluctantly and only as a last resort. The founders would have been pleased. He also gave the Canal Zone—a U.S. colonial chunk of Panama—back to its rightful owners....

[Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Lauren Gottlieb provided research assistance for this article.]

Even before the Panic of 2008 sent financial markets into turmoil and launched what looks like the worst global recession in decades, talk of American decline was omnipresent. In the long term, the United States faces the rise of Asia and the looming fiscal problems posed by Medicare and other entitlement programs. In the short term, there is a sense that, after eight years of George W. Bush, the world, full of disdain for our way of life, seems to be spinning out of our--and perhaps anybody's--control. The financial panic simply brought all that simmering anxiety to a boil, and the consensus now seems to be that the United States isn't just in danger of decline, but in the full throes of it--the beginning of a "post-American" world.

Perhaps--but the long history of capitalism suggests another possibility. After all, capitalism has seen a steady procession of economic crises and panics, from the seventeenth-century Tulip Bubble in the Netherlands and the Stop of the Exchequer under Charles II in England through the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of the early eighteenth century, on through the crises associated with the Napoleonic wars and the spectacular economic crashes that repeatedly wrought havoc and devastation to millions throughout the nineteenth century. The panics of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907 were especially severe, culminating in the Great Crash of 1929, which set off a depression that would not end until World War II. The series of crises continued after the war, and the last generation has seen the Penn Central bankruptcy in 1970, the first Arab oil crisis of 1973, the Third World debt crisis of 1982, the S&L crisis, the Asian crisis of 1997, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, and today's global financial meltdown.

And yet, this relentless series of crises has not disrupted the rise of a global capitalist system, centered first on the power of the United Kingdom and then, since World War II, on the power of the United States. After more than 300 years, it seems reasonable to conclude that financial and economic crises do not, by themselves, threaten either the international capitalist system or the special role within it of leading capitalist powers like the United Kingdom and the United States. If anything, the opposite seems true--that financial crises in some way sustain Anglophone power and capitalist development.

Indeed, many critics of both capitalism and the "Anglo-Saxons" who practice it so aggressively have pointed to what seems to be a perverse relationship between such crises and the consolidation of the "core" capitalist economies against the impoverished periphery. Marx noted that financial crises remorselessly crushed weaker companies, allowing the most successful and ruthless capitalists to cement their domination of the system. For dependency theorists like Raul Prebisch, crises served a similar function in the international system, helping stronger countries marginalize and impoverish developing ones.

Setting aside the flaws in both these overarching theories of capitalism, this analysis of economic crises is fundamentally sound--and especially relevant to the current meltdown. Cataloguing the early losses from the financial crisis, it's hard not to conclude that the central capitalist nations will weather the storm far better than those not so central. Emerging markets have been hit harder by the financial crisis than developed ones as investors around the world seek the safe haven provided by U.S. Treasury bills, and commodity-producing economies have suffered extraordinary shocks as commodity prices crashed from their record, boom-time highs. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, which hoped to use oil revenue to mount a serious political challenge to American power and the existing world order, face serious new constraints. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must now spend less time planning big international moves and think a little bit harder about domestic stability. Far from being the last nail in America's coffin, the financial crisis may actually resuscitate U.S. power relative to its rivals....

[Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American Culture, History, and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association's 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award "for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present."]

With tens of millions in America and worldwide breathlessly awaiting his words, Barack Obama spoke of the "gathering clouds" and "raging storms" of crisis brought on by our profligate ways.

The economic meltdown, he declared, is "a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices." Our failure to take energy conservation seriously has served to "strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet." And the crisis we face is not only marked by data and statistics but also by "a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable."

Amazingly, it took the new president less than five minutes to call an end to an era of denial.

Many would argue that this era of denial began when George "dubya," dubiously elected in the debacle of 2000, claimed a mandate; when he exploited 9/11 to impose a foreign and domestic agenda guided by a "you are either with us or against us" mentality; when he implored Americans to keep shopping to bolster the economy in a time of war; and when he declared "mission accomplished" for a crusade waged on false pretenses.

Others, however, could claim that our era of national denial dates back to our failure to heed Jimmy Carter's call to end our dependency on foreign oil. On July 15, 1979, before a live TV audience in prime time, Carter called upon America to overcome "fragmentation and self-interest" and to reject "a mistaken idea of freedom" characterized by "the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others." He warned us of a weakening dollar, economic stagnation, skyrocketing inflation, and deepening personal and national debt.

But he may have been too prophetic for his own good when he remarked that "too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption." His next words -- "Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns" -- became the mantra of a new era of easy money, lax regulation, and Wall Street excess.

Standing at "a turning point in history," Carter called on us to find "the path of common purpose" and bring about "the restoration of American values." Deep down inside, we knew that "piling up material goods" would not answer "our longing for meaning" or "fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose." "The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers," said Carter, "clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual."

This was Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech. It became commonly-known and ultimately ridiculed as his "malaise" speech -- the mark of a failed presidency. I was stunned by how much Obama's inaugural address, rooted in the theme of "a new era of responsibility," echoed Carter. That took audacity.

But more than Carter's speech, I thought of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who moved to end not only our national denial of the problem of racism but also the problems of materialism and militarism.

For most of the inaugural address, I maintained my scholarly sense of historical context and analytical detachment. What finally reduced me tears, however, was Obama's invocation to return to difficult truths and timeless values that have been "the quiet force of progress throughout our history." These are the truths and values that define "the price and the promise of citizenship."

"We have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world," spoke Obama, "duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task."

More than ceremonial trappings, these expressions of human purpose are what I find most moving. I was especially reminded of how, as a young preacher in 1954, King called on the faithful to "rediscover lost values." He remarked, "Automobiles and subways, televisions and radios, dollars and cents can never be substitutes for God." Sometimes, he advised, we need to go forwards by going backwards.

King tried to shake us out of a denial that allowed Americans to believe that dropping atomic bombs on civilians could be a force for peace. Our moral and spiritual progress, he declared, needed to catch up with our technological and material progress. We had become a society with "guided missiles" but "misguided men."

And when he proclaimed that we must reckon with our history as a nation "founded on genocide," as well as slavery, King challenged us to embrace not only the purity and of the American ideal of freedom but also the suffering and struggle that are the true ingredients of democracy.

As King embarked on a long and arduous struggle, as he moved to square his "other-worldly" ideals with "this-worldly" realities, as he endured tremendous personal sacrifices of his health and well-being, as he witnessed his comrades maimed and his people attacked, and as he watched his "dream" turn into the "nightmare" of white backlash and the Vietnam War, he began to redefine the meaning of going forwards.

King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967):

"The stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing'-oriented society to a 'person'-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.
None of us can predict what will come of the Obama presidency. The debates over policies, regulations, and spending have just begun. And we can't know if Obama's call to reclaim lost values will be the first step toward a revolution of values or the last. Indeed, we should already understand that it us up to all of us -- the "yes, we can" millions -- to determine what this turning point in history will ultimately represent to us, our children, and our children's children."

Still, as a leader, Obama displays every evidence that he possesses a fast learning-curve and a tremendous capacity for growth. "We remain a young nation," he reminded us, "but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things." It is up to us "to shape an uncertain destiny."

Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement leaders defined their mission: "to save the soul of America." Obama's address can serve as a reminder of that incomplete mission. "Starting today," he declared, "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."

Watching the presidential inauguration in Philadelphia on a giant screen set against the backdrop of Independence Hall, the birthplace of the American republic, I thought of how each generation is blessed with the opportunity and charged with the responsibility to renew and redefine the struggles of those who came before us.

When Aretha Franklin sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee," the sound of freedom never sounded sweeter, my love of America never greater.

Standing within sight of the Liberty Bell, near the hall where Obama delivered his stirring address on race, and among an incredibly diverse crowd of people, we fully appreciated Obama's message that "our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness."

And as I watched the first African American president take the oath of office while holding my three-year old daughter -- who had just visited the Constitutional Center and was proudly shouting "We, the people!" the rest of the day -- I thought of how far we have come as a nation and how much potential we have to go further in our quest to build a more perfect union.

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely on current events.]

... In many respects, the current White House is as impressive as the one that Kennedy and Johnson assembled. Obama has drawn on the nation's best universities, the most talented pool of campaign operatives and writers, and the top echelons of the national security and economics establishments.

While there is nothing inevitable about talent making mistakes, there are weaknesses that [David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest] saw in Kennedy's generation that would be worth remembering today. The first is hubris.

Halberstam's account traces how Kennedy's team, which had extensive experience in the national security establishment and had built the institutions of the Cold War, were so confident in their vision and ability that they didn't have a sense of their own limitations.

Though he understood, early on, the enormous challenges that the U.S. confronted in defending South Vietnam, the "Whiz Kid" Robert McNamara was certain that he could figure out a way to make the policy work. The numbers said the mission was possible.

The confidence of McNamara and his colleagues caused them to downplay, or to simply ignore, strong warning signals they were hearing from military officials, certain administration officials and many legislators, and to instead push the nation into the war.

The second mistake was being trapped in the politics of the past. For Kennedy's generation of Democrats (and Republicans, like McNamara, who worked for him), one of the main problems was overcoming the political damage that had resulted from the "Who Lost China" debates.

In the elections of 1952 and 1956, Dwight Eisenhower had won the presidency (and Congress from 1952 to 1954) by charging that President Harry Truman had failed to support the Chinese Nationalists in 1949 against a communist revolution.

Kennedy's team was determined not to lose on that score again. They wanted to burnish their hawkish credentials and were leery about giving Republicans the opportunity to paint them as weak on defense. This led them to make poor decisions.

Obama's team faces a similar challenge. Democrats had been battered for many years by conservatives who charged they were unwilling to challenge communism and then terrorist networks.

Sometimes Obama's team has articulated a new national security agenda -- talking about multilateralism and diplomacy and "Smart Power" and new initiatives in the Middle East.

But at other times, his team has attempted to show that Democrats can be equally aggressive on defense -- appointing Bob Gates to secretary of defense and talking tough about a significant escalation of force in Afghanistan. Obama has remained largely silent on recent events in the Middle East.

The final trap was disdain for the legislative branch. Kennedy's generation of the best and brightest were believers in the "imperial presidency." They came from an era when liberals thought the executive branch was more sophisticated, efficient and capable. They didn't have much good to say about Congress.

In their mind, senior Democrats who had made their career in Congress, such as Johnson, represented a type of politician who was crass and ignorant, only concerned with getting as many votes as possible, who needed to be overcome. Even when working for Johnson after he became president when Kennedy was assassinated, they expressed the same feelings, including about their own boss.

This was unfortunate since there were many legislators, such as Georgia's Richard Russell on the right and Idaho's Frank Church on the left, who were early voices of opposition to escalating America's involvement in the war.

This mentality could be a trap for Obama's team as well....

[Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the editor of “Lincoln on Race and Slavery” and the producer of the forthcoming PBS documentary “Looking for Lincoln.” John Stauffer is the author, most recently, of “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.”]

... Much has been written about what Mr. Obama thinks about Lincoln; but not much has been said about what Lincoln would think of Barack Hussein Obama. If his marble statue at the Lincoln Memorial could become flesh and speak, like Galatea, what would the man who is remembered for freeing the slaves say about his first black successor?

It is difficult to say for sure, of course, but one thing we can be fairly certain about is that Lincoln would have been, um, surprised. Lincoln was thoroughly a man of his times, and while he staunchly opposed slavery — on moral grounds and because it made competition in the marketplace unfair for poor white men — for most of his life he harbored fixed and unfortunate ideas about race.

Lincoln had a very complex relationship with blacks. Abolition was a fundamental part of Lincoln’s moral compass, but equality was not. While he was an early, consistent and formidable foe of slavery, Lincoln had much more ambivalent feelings about blacks themselves, especially about whether they were, or could ever be, truly equal with whites.

For example, on Aug. 14, 1862, he invited five black men to the White House to convince them to become the founders of a new nation in Panama consisting of those slaves he was about to free. A month before emancipation became law, he proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing financing for blacks who wished to emigrate to Liberia or Haiti.

Degrading words, deplored by most white abolitionists, like “Sambo” and “Cuffee,” found their way into Lincoln’s descriptions of blacks; he even used “nigger” several times in speeches. He also liked to tell “darkie” jokes and had a penchant for black-faced minstrel shows. The Lincoln of pre-White House days was a long way from the Great Emancipator; “recovering racist” would be closer to the truth....