WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: A feckless American foreign policy’s legacy. “One idea in particular is going to have to go. Following the Cold War, the American foreign-policy establishment embraced the tragically misguided belief that we could set aside traditional forms of great-power competition and balance-of-power diplomacy while focusing our efforts on “global issues” like human rights, climate change and the construction of an ever-stronger set of international institutions operating under an ever-more-pervasive system of international law.”