Yale professor Charles Hill’s impressive mind was on display last weekend in the Wall Street Journal’s regular interview in the Saturday/Sunday issue. He was interviewed by the paper’s editorial features editor, Robert L. Pollock, who probed Hill’s thinking on the state of the world and bundled it up into a provocative article. The piece offered much to ponder—but also a key to the wrong turn America has taken in its foreign policy since the Cold War’s end.

Hill’s background includes extensive experiences in the U.S. Foreign Service, with particular emphasis on China and the Middle East. U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have solicited his counsel, and he was a consultant to UN secretary-general Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His courses at Yale, filled with real-world observations as well as academic depth, are highly popular.

As outlined by Pollock, with abundant quotes from Hill, the professor’s views can be summed up along the following lines:

One of the great turning points in history occurred following the awesomely bloody Thirty Years War in seventeenth-century Europe. That was the Treaty of Westphalia, which sanctified the state in international dealings and set it above empire in the global value system, at least in the West. Hill explains that that religious war pitted the Catholic Holy Roman Empire against a number of emergent Protestant states, and it "was so awful that it produced Grotius," the Dutch philosopher of international law.

Grotius’s thinking and the Westphalia treaty, says Hill, "put in place what would develop into the international state system . . . a work of genius." Essentially, he explains, the state replaced the empire as the fundamental unit of world affairs.

It was solidified further at the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna, where the big European powers amplified the criteria of international opprobrium and established more extensive laws governing dealings among states.

Says Hill: "My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back." He cites World War I, "a war of empires which comes to its culmination point when a state gets into it"—namely, the United States, which under President Woodrow Wilson turned that struggle into a moral crusade for democracy promotion.

World War II, he adds, was "a war of empires against the state system." Hitler wanted to expand eastward into a powerful land empire encompassing the heartland of Eurasia, while Japan wanted to dominate what it called the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."

Here’s where the historical narrative gets a little ragged. Pollock asks, "Is the story uncomplicated?" He answers: "Of course not." One problem is that one of those anti-German and anti-Japanese nations was Great Britain, which was also an empire. But, says Hill, Britain’s empire had established the rules-based system that prevailed through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—"committed to abolishing slavery and to free trade and free movement on the seas."

And then, when it faded, the United States stepped in to assume that role. As Pollock puts it, the U.S. grand strategy since Harry Truman "has been the establishment of a rules-based system built on institutions like the UN and NATO. It’s a system designed to protect the rights of states to Wilsonian ‘self-determination,’ not to subject them to the will of the strongest." Explaining Hill, Pollock adds that the UN only serves its purpose when it is used as an instrument of the state system, not when it goes off on its own, even at the invitation of the state system, to act as some kind of global governing authority.

Under this state system over many centuries, writes Pollock, there emerged "a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen." As Hill puts it, the world has "been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom." And at the center of this development has been the United States.

But Hill worries that this era could come to an abrupt end. What would replace it? Hill’s answer: "Spheres of influence," which Hill equates to "empire."

He elaborates: "The whole system has been defended by the leadership of the U.S. and its allies. And the idea of open expression and open trade is the American way of seeing the world improve itself in the future. If America is not gonna do that, nobody else is gonna do it. And that’s what’s happening now."

One culprit, in this view, is President Obama, who has abandoned an American commitment that stretches back to the beginning of the Cold War. As Pollock puts it, "What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman." That consensus culminated in President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which Hill equates to an "emancipation proclamation for the world."

To sum up for purposes of analysis, Hill is saying that the Westphalian state system set in motion centuries of global development and progress that found its most distilled expression in George W. Bush’s call for his country to take on "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." And now Barack Obama has caused an utter break from that centuries-long development vector and imperiled the globe with a possible re-emergence of empire.

This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, Britain was a nation and an empire, whatever its long commitment to ending slavery or to ensuring open sea-lanes and free trade. So was the United States. And, like all nations, both went into the world first and foremost to pursue their own economic and geopolitical interests, which happened to include open sea-lanes and free trade.

Second, the idea that Wilson set the country upon a new course of "Wilsonian" idealism in foreign policy doesn’t stand the test of history. Wilson manipulated America into World War I through a one-sided neutrality policy that his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, warned would lead to war. (Bryan resigned over the issue.) After America entered that war, Wilson fostered a ham-handed governmental takeover of the domestic economy that unleashed a powerful recession. He assured Germany that any peace settlement would be based on his evenhanded "Fourteen Points," and then, after the beleaguered Germans accepted an armistice based on his assurances, the president proved impotent in his efforts to redeem those promises at the Versailles peace negotiations. The result was a diplomatic mess that led straight to Hitler and World War II.

In the meantime, the American people expelled Wilson’s party from the White House with a rare decisiveness. Harding of Ohio, hardly a distinguished personage, received fully 60.3 percent of the popular vote against his Democratic opponent in 1920, and Republicans picked up sixty-three House seats and eleven in the Senate. The country has seen few political repudiations of such magnitude.

Thus, it’s naively fanciful to suggest America’s role in the state system has been to promote democracy and foster a happy existence for peoples throughout the world. The central reason America embraced its bold world role in Truman’s time was to foster global stability and save the West from the menacing Soviet Union, which had gained the kind of threatening Eurasian dominance that Hitler had been prevented from grabbing. It was all about power—American power to counter Soviet power.

Indeed, it’s always about power, and to the extent that any nation possesses an abundance of it, that nation’s central goal should be to preserve, to the fullest extent possible, a balance in its distribution among nations. That’s why Hill’s denigration of "spheres of influence" was disturbing. There are always going to be spheres of influence; the only question is whose spheres they will be and how big—and whether they can be checked by other nations dominating other spheres.

Hill seems to be saying that in his hallowed state system, there is only one sphere, and it should be dominated by the United States, perpetuated in the interest of gauzy Wilsonian idealism. Can’t be done.

For one thing, as we know from the George W. Bush adventures, even a nation as rich and powerful as the United States will crumble under the weight of such a mission. For another, the world’s state system is not static. It is burgeoning, with more and more regional states emerging as independent power centers with serious national ambitions. This is scrambling up the old interrelationships of power around the world. A new era is emerging, and it will require new global thinking and new approaches to international relations and military strategy.

So there’s no reason to be "amazed," as Pollock puts it (characterizing Hill’s perception) at the break represented by the Obama foreign policy because it isn’t that much of a break at all. The break came when the Cold War ended. Many Americans—including, it seems, Charles Hill—have had a hard time recognizing just what a profound break that was and how much it necessitates new thinking about how America must respond to it in order to maintain its standing in the world. If the country can’t absorb this fundamental reality of world politics, unfolding events—unsentimental and inexorable—will explain it all in due course.