Ambassador Khalilzad (“Peace in the Middle East,” Summer 2008) presented productive answers to the questions posed to him regarding strategies to contain extremism. He spoke of the importance of understanding the struggle today between conservatives and liberals within the Muslim world. He spoke of the need to resolve regional issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He spoke of the need to incentivize societies around a centrist platform. He spoke of the need for the United States to use diplomacy as much as possible towards Iran, while bringing Iraqis together. These are all good and important points.

Something central, however, was missing from his remarks. In order for the United States to be a credible player on the international stage once again, we must regain the moral high ground. In order to do this, we must reconfront who we are as Americans. Since 9/11, a range of issues have damaged our credibility abroad like never before: Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, a unilateral war on Iraq to rid it of weapons of mass destruction based on now discredited evidence, and even how we treat our Muslim minorities at home.

America has faced a similar crisis before. In the last century, during the Cold War’s “War of Ideas,” previous US administrations—including those of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon—realized that unless America faced up to racism at home and embraced the message of inclusion of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States would not have the credibility to win hearts and minds across the Cold War battlefields of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

How did this play out in our day to day actions as a nation? In 1958, an African American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing $1.95 in change. Back then, a media called television, along with radio and print media carried the story around the world faster than ever before. This eroded US moral leadership among European allies, gave fodder to the Soviets to attack our values, and undermined the United States’ best efforts at international “public diplomacy.” With letters of protest pouring in from around the world to US embassies, the White House, and Alabama, it wasn’t until Secretary of State John Foster Dulles implored the Governor of Alabama to commute the sentence in order to restore the US good name that the tide began to turn. The link between the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War was established in the minds of the policy-makers of the day.

Going back even further, during the American Civil War, Republican President Abraham Lincoln said he hated slavery, “not only because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” but, he added, “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.”

Today, the best thing that we Americans can do to help strengthen centrist pluralism in the Muslim world, and return to being the “shining light upon the hill” in the eyes of the world is to do a better job at living up to our ideals. This will mean: closing our facility at Guantanamo Bay, standing firm against the use of torture, and working towards a rapid, honorable end to the U.S. military presence in Iraq. We should also do a better job of respecting our Muslim minorities at home and working to put American Muslims like Ambassador Khalilzad at the highest level of government. A hard look in the mirror, and a change of our own behavior at home, must be part of our overall policy if we are to successfully contain extremism abroad.