Josef Joffe is a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University. He is also publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Truman had a universal doctrine — “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” Everywhere. So did Kennedy, who was willing to “pay any price, bear any burden… to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” So did George W. Bush with his Freedom Agenda, which would support democratic movements and institutions in every nation, with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.” Here, there and everywhere.

Mr. Obama came across measured and prudent, but not as Mr. Big. “It’s your friendly ex-superpower calling,” he seemed to say.

The Obama doctrine, as presented on Monday night, says something very different: Maybe here, but not there; maybe a little, but not all the way. Maybe to save lives, but not to change regimes. Maybe to lead, but not for very long. In short, as President Obama stated, “the burden of action should not be America’s alone.”

This is “Universalism Lite.” And “America Lite” because the U.S. “should not be expected to police the world, particularly when we have so many pressing concerns here at home.” Mind you, no president since Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to make the “world safe for democracy,” has ever put his limited money where his universalist mouth was. High-flying rhetoric was always brought down by earthly means and hard-core interests.

America’s real-life universalism was always selective. It was Kaiser Bill who drew the U.S. into World War I, not the idea of democracy for Germany. So with Hitler and Hirohito. Nor did this “Empire of Liberty,” as Jefferson called it, seek to strangle any of those nasty bedfellows collected as allies against bigger and meaner threats. How shall we count the names? A whole slew of dictators in Latin America, fascists and strongmen, and all those potentates in the Middle East. Pure humanitarianism never guided any American missile, well, maybe twice: in Mogadishu and Serbia. But Clinton had to be dragged into the Kosovo War, and after 18 servicemen were killed in Somalia, he hightailed out of there.

So there is nothing wrong with bringing ends in line with means and interests. It’s the American way — and the way of all great powers. And yet. The Obama doctrine is to Truman et al. like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power -- kind of un-American, isn't it?

You have to go back to the very early days of the Republic, when it was weak and small, to hear a president speak like Obama — to John Quincy Adams, for instance, who would “not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” America, he said, “is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all,” but the “champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Mr. Obama came across measured and prudent, but not as Mr. Big. “It’s your friendly ex-superpower calling,” he seemed to say. We might have the clout, he insinuated, but we won’t use it. (In fact, without U.S. firepower, which is good for half of the sorties over Libya, neither France nor Britain could have mounted the no-fly operation.) We’ll lead a little, but not too far because “if we tried to overthrow Gaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter.” So U.S. power is being socialized, with a veto for each and all. This is a first. No more exceptionalism, no more “last best hope of earth,” as Lincoln put it in 1862.

Future historians will not accuse Mr. Obama of woolly-eyed idealism. They might even praise him for his cold-blooded realism that put an end to hype and hypocrisy. But they might also add that with his address on Libya he ended — or tried to end — America’s career as a power like no other. “Libya” would certainly make for a fitting epitaph. For it was in the war against the “Bey of Tripoli” and the Barbary pirates, the first after the Revolution, that America staked out its claim to world power and responsibility.