After WWII, when the US still led by example and stood upon the fundamental principles that we ourselves were founded upon, revolutionary people around the world with diverse cultures, such as the Muslim Berbers in Algeria, and the communist rebels led by Ho in Indochina, turned to the US with copies of our universal declaration of independence in hand and cried out, "us too!!"
But we turned our backs on them, and we turned our backs on our principles as well. To exercise a system of control over half the world due to a largely irrational fear of Russia and the decision to lay siege to Russia via containment as a strategy, had made our principles inconvenient - so we watered them down and qualified them with values.
FDR died with a vision of promoting the "four freedoms" (of religion and speech, from fear and want); the end of colonialism; the right to self determination; and a vision of the four emerging powers (US, UK, Russia and China) working together as a new global security partnership to replace the failed league of nations.
But we let our own exaggerated fears drive us to a values based system of directed leadership - and today we still live with the good and bad of that decision.
The neocons are as lost as are the social engineers wishing to conform everyone to our current (certainly not "enduring" or "universal" as arrogantly packaged in the past 2 or 3 National Security Strategies) values.
I for one am not afraid of our founding principles, and believe it is long overdue for the US to assume the risk necessary to be the principled leader by example we believe ourselves to be, and to finally abandon the directive leadership relying upon sloganed "values" that we have actually been employing for the past several decades.
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