Lévy begins and ends his book with the story of the Kurds, who joined with the United States and its allies to fight ISIS but then never got the backing they hoped for in support of their own independence. Despite his own efforts to rally American and European policymakers, the Kurds’ “sister democracies … uttered not a word as Kurdish houses in Kirkuk were gassed and ransacked, women raped, people tortured.” In recounting this tragedy, Lévy reflects not at all on the last time he made himself a player in such a cause: his effort, in 2011, to persuade the United States and Europe to intervene in Libya. That action stopped a possible massacre in Benghazi and helped bring about the murderous Muammar el-Qaddafi’s downfall, but it also stoked a bloody civil war that continues today. Lévy is less interested in weighing consequences than he is in celebrating the purity of intent, the nobility of the cause, the heroism of the stand.

That, to Carpenter, is exactly where American foreign policy has gone wrong. Since the 1980s, as he tells it, the United States has repeatedly fallen for the charm offensives of foreign actors — insurgent groups, protest movements, dissidents — who con Washington into reckless action. What Lévy sees as a virtuous hegemon, Carpenter sees as a naïve and hapless superpower playing the sucker to “foreign factions … adept at exploiting Americans’ sincere desire for the spread of enlightened liberal capitalist ideals.”

Carpenter marshals example after cringe-inducing example of American politicians and commentators hailing unsavory foreign movements as the “moral equal of our founding fathers” — as Ronald Reagan said of a Nicaraguan contra army led largely by officers loyal to a fallen dictator. In various Cold War proxy battles, in the Iraq war, in the debate over Syria, in the Libya intervention — again and again, predictions of a peaceful democratic future have yielded dismal results.

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Yet by focusing on the gauzy myths that tend to dominate speeches and newspaper columns, Carpenter evades the harder questions and more cold-blooded calculations that lie behind them. (He also has the same fondness for overstatement and overreliance on sketchy evidence that he lambastes in others.) As often as not, high-flown rhetoric is deployed in the service of some other foreign policy goal; an American leader may have led with talk of democracy or human rights even when they are secondary to, or mere covers for, other, less idealistic considerations. Indeed, Carpenter concedes of several of his cases that a “strategic rationale” for some action existed, even if the exalted language used to sell it could not withstand scrutiny.

For all their dissimilarity, Lévy and Carpenter share an unstated conviction that runs through most American debates about foreign policy: that all good things should come together. Like Lévy, we want every moral cause to also be strategically smart; like Carpenter, we want to believe that a choice made on prudential grounds won’t involve costs to ideals or values we hold dear. We want always to do well by doing good, and good by doing well. Unfortunately, in foreign policy, only in rare circumstances do all good things actually come together — and even less in a time of contested power than in a time of primacy. The trade-offs to come will be both wrenching and inescapable.

In the early days of the Cold War — the last time the American foreign policy establishment converged around a broad objective — one of the most influential “committed intellectuals,” to use Lévy’s term, was the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was famous for his Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” If we are in fact entering a new era of great power competition, determining what we can and cannot change will be the most important, and the most difficult, task ahead. Carpenter makes a pointed case for serenity. Lévy issues a fervent call for courage. Neither offers much of the wisdom we’ll need to know the difference.