WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Shores Of Tripoli: Our Latest Wilsonian War. “The Wilsonians now have their war; they also now have their president. Barack Obama’s inner Woodrow Wilson has clearly won out; he has nailed his colors to the mast of a liberal international foreign policy. The cautious Jeffersonian realists have lost one policy battle after another in this administration. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn law (‘if you break it, you own it’) has been cast to the winds. A president who won his party’s nomination as the most consistent opponent of unpopular interventions abroad has become an apostle of liberal war. Not since Saul went to Damascus has there been such a dramatic conversion. . . . Like Wilson, President Obama is going to find it easier to fight for humanitarian ideals than to make them prevail.”

Say, we sure haven’t heard much from Colin Powell lately, have we?