Max Boot looks to John Kerry’s record on foreign policy to determine how he might treat the subject if elected president. What he has found, however, is confusion. When Reagan and Bush ’41 were president he voted like an isolationist; after Clinton’s election he was a born-again Wilsonian, supporting military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Haiti. And lately he’s been sounding like a realist, endorsing the hardheaded pursuit of vital national interests.

"This muddle raises the question of whether Kerry has a worldview, or whether he merely goes wherever the political winds blow. Surely it’s no coincidence that his stances track precisely mainstream Democratic opinion, which was isolationist in the 1970s and 1980s, idealistically interventionist in the 1990s and coldly realist since 2001. When the Democrats were split, as they were over Iraq in 2002 and 2003, he clumsily tried to appease both hawks and doves. Where he will wind up nobody knows — not even, I suspect, him."