Among Americans of my age, the British Navy is known for Churchill’s famous (and apocryphal) quip about rum, sodomy, and the lash. Some might hold hazy memories of the Falklands War and video shots of Royal Navy Harriers providing power projection in the United Kingdom’s decision not to let a group of dictators overturn centuries of right. Those with a penchant for World War II (or the music of Johnny Horton) might remember the sinking of the Bismarck. For most, that’s about it.

But that’s not it — not by a long measure. Though hardly peopled with saints, the British Navy holds claim to one of the greatest moral achievements of the post-Counter-Reformation era, the end of the international slave trade. It was a remarkable achievement, notable not only for an effective blockade of Africa and an end to a centuries-old human atrocity, but for Britain’s ability to drive even ambivalent slave powers — for example, the United States — to send ships to join the blockade. (By law, the United States had abolished the slave trade into America; it had not promised to end it across thousands of miles of ocean.) Whether inspired by a wave of Christian activism or a crass desire to keep British workers competitive on the world stage, Britain’s more or less unparalleled might on the high seas and its fierce determination to end an abomination made the world an appreciably better place.

What few appreciate is that the British Navy also helped give rise to the world of free trade and commerce we appreciate and live by even today, protectionism and Congressional Democrats notwithstanding. Indisputably, Europe, Asia, Africa, and, to some limited extent, the Americas, had engaged in trade before Britain made the seas more or less its own; but the British Navy, enforcing Britain’s power and desire to trade, and upholding the laws of decent men by hanging pirates where they found them or burning pirate ships (with pirates still on them) made the centuries-old scourge of piracy a thing of children’s fantasies, rather than a real terror for merchants and crews.

In so doing, they made the seas safe travel lanes, and helped the world trade and grow in ways impossible to measure.

The British of the nineteenth century understood that a world forced into stability and order abroad could only produce benefits at home; that trade could yield wealth and goods beyond the imaginations of Englishmen but a century before; and that time, talent, treasure, and blood spent in pursuit of those goals would make the world, and Great Britain, better places. They sacrificed and gave so that their lives, and their children’s lives, and yes, the lives of people whom they believed inferior by dint of creed or color, would be better. They sinned and caused a great deal of misery, but they did a great deal of good in the process.

The American political consensus since World War II has been that a stable world abroad, with an actively engaged America, inures to the benefit of Americans and humanity in general. We understood that prosperity at home was, paradoxically, best made abroad. For our pains — for our time, talent, treasure, and blood spent — the world is a place of historically incredible material wealth and health. Even the much-derided, go-it-alone, criminally unilateral Bush Administration opened trade throughout the world and did its level best to end human suffering through the application of targeted force and unparalleled amounts of human aid to the poorest of the poor. Our sacrifice has left us, the current economic downturn notwithstanding, with expanding lifespans, technology and food and clothing and shelter cheaper and better than our parents dared dream, and in a position of power and influence such that no country in its right mind would dare attack America, and any that did would shortly thereafter cease to exist.

We could do this because in the years after World War II, we showed the world that there was something to be gained in human freedom, and in a marketplace where men and women could strive to better themselves. We did it because, especially after we’d outraced the Soviets, even the Clinton Administration was perceived as the big dog on the block, and all the promises of international order pointlessly made by pan-national chatting blocks were enforced by carrier groups bearing our flag. Even Jimmy Carter, history’s greatest monster and sycophant to left-wing tyrants, intermittently understood this.

It is worrisome that Barack Obama, whose administration is filled with Clinton and Carter retreads, does not.

Had you asked me, two weeks ago, to describe Barack Obama’s foreign policy stance, I would have declined, because frankly, I couldn’t have begun to tell you. His rhetorical style was designed to evoke Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt. His personnel took their cues from Hillary Clinton, a classic liberal internationalist. His most ardent supporters, and much of his rhetoric on the campaign trail, said that he was an American declinist. His foreign policy’s team’s early acts were to confuse China; tell India that we had decided to abandon the world’s largest democracy for its psychotic, borderline Islamist rival; send mixed signals to Japan; assure the Europeans that Clintonism was back; apologize to the Muslim world for liberating Iraq and driving Serbian Christians from their beloved Kosovo Field; and, truthfully, largely ignore Africa and Latin America.

One month into his Presidency, assuming no vision-altering event like 9/11, we can now say that Barack Obama represents the near-term triumph of liberal realism in his Party, and at the very least, the subjugation of the old, liberal democratic wing. Gone (for now) are Roosevelt’s determination to lever the world for America’s advantage, and to bring light and hope to the dark; Truman’s determination to undo the mistake of Yalta; Kennedy’s promise to pay any price; Johnson’s willingness to spend blood and treasure; and even Clinton’s willingness to play the heavy when endless conferences did not yield results. Instead, we have Henry Wallace’s accommodation with communists; Carter’s public resignation to the limits of America’s power; and John Kerry’s and Tom Harkin’s determination to provide political cover to men not fit to eat at the table of the civilized. It’s a remarkable thing: The realists have been purged from the Republican Party, and found a home in the Party of Woodrow Wilson.

Obama has not been shy about this complete turnaround from the post-War consensus. In China, he has made clear that Beijing has a free hand in Asia. In international fora, he has lent America’s prestige to those who blood-libel Israel. With Iraq largely but not completely pacified, he has decided to leave it at the mercies of Iran. And of course, he has made a total hash of American-Indian relations, souring the great work achieved by Presidents Bush and Clinton, presumably so that he has a freer hand to engage in low-intensity, low-likelihood-of-success war in Afghanistan.

He has signaled to the international community that America either believes itself powerless to engage and transform the world, or has no desire to do so. The nations of the world have begun to notice.

Liberty, to borrow a phrase from one of the least intellectually rigorous Supreme Court decisions of the last century, finds no refuge in an international order of doubt. As overt American power projection begins to fade from the world stage, new relationships — relationships not always to our liking — will rise in their place. It is the way of vacuums that they are filled; though it is not the way of Americans to leave those vacuums behind for long, we appear determined to begin the departure phase of the cycle now.

It is therefore no surprise that Taiwan is bringing itself closer to China, especially when trade has picked up with the mainland and it can no longer be certain that America would deploy AEGIS cruisers and carrier groups to act as its shield against a Chinese amphibious assault. It is wholly unsurprising that Japan is determined to leave behind its special relationship with the United States for the more aggressive reach of China.

In the next few years, India and Pakistan will have to realign their relationship once again, with American power and influence coming down on Pakistan’s side more often. The former Soviet bloc must now make peace with its former master, trapped between an apathetic European Union and a Russia that will eventually overcome its commodities-market crash, with no real likelihood of an America humbled by the repeated sacrifices of the Poles. The rising bloodshed in Africa will continue, as there is precisely no likelihood of applied American power being used to calm a place where only the Chinese are smart enough to see strategic importance.

Seeing America withdraw into itself, the nations of Asia and Latin America will form regional power blocs in which America is, at best, an afterthought. For those of us who like fresh produce year-round, cheap electronics, and ready capital, the world will note that America no longer believes in its own rhetoric on free trade. It will note that we continue to maintain trade barriers and agricultural subsidies (as there is no chance any Democrat will lower or end either of these), and see no value in more free trade agreements, let alone anything so ambitious as the Doha round. Other nations, with very different ideas about trade and power, will come to the fore. While we are unlikely to see a wave of trade walls from the 1930s, we will see a slow withdrawal from the free movement of goods and capital across the world. We will be poorer for it.

Many Americans will wonder why all of this happens when it happens — because after all, will we have not become the model citizen the world demanded of us for years?

To ask the question is to answer it. Model citizens are only possible when there is a polity to which they can belong. Putting to the side the age-old question of whether the international order is a polity or a state of nature, a polity needs to enforce its laws, which in turn means a monopoly or near-monopoly on the use of force. In other words, no sheriff, no town. Without America to act as sheriff, there is no one out there willing or able to do so. Anyone who would suggest the United Nations for this role should be excused from adult conversation for the rest of his life.

One of the first harbingers of this disorder will be piracy, that scourge defeated by those stalwart men centuries ago. Right now, piracy has faded from Asia, and is resurgent in a limited way off the coast of Africa. With a world increasingly impoverished, with no strong hand to excise this long-forgetten stain, expect it to spread beyond Africa, back into Asia, and perhaps beyond. We can console ourselves with the knowledge that we’ll give the fraction of pirates we capture due process before handing them over to countries who will release them again, seeing no value in wasting treasure on nuisances.

America retains the power (if not the will) to make the world a better place (though hardly a perfect one) for its citizens and humanity at large. In the next several years, with current trends, we will see what the world looks like without us, and we will pay for it.