Anne-Marie Slaughter is now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, where she also holds a chair in international affairs. She is also on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was formerly a professor at the Harvard Law School and president of the American Society of International Law.

Whatever else one might say of this résumé, Dean Slaughter’s past work — most notably on European integration and transnational judicial borrowings — has not established her as a scholar of Americana. “The Idea That Is America” (Basic Books, 254 pages, $25.95) won’t do that either. It does not focus on a pre-eminent American “idea” but rambles through seven of them — including “liberty,” “democracy,” “justice,” and “tolerance.” As Ms. Slaughter herself is at pains to emphasize, none of these “ideas” is distinctively American — which is perhaps the point.

Each chapter starts with some inspiring quotation from some distinguished American statesman, and then wends its way through a few contemporary disputes before drawing a moral regarding our foreign policy. The chapters might each work as a speech delivered at a Princeton graduation. As an overall analysis or interpretation of American commitments, there’s not much to this book.

But the book doesn’t make much effort to be rigorous or scholarly or even original. It might be best understood as a sort of campaign advertisement for someone who might reasonably expect to be considered for high office in the foreign policy structure of the next Democratic administration. Call it “The Audacity of Hope for High Office.”

Considered in that light, it offers good news and bad news. The bad news might be more evident — at least for people concerned about policies and their actual consequences. The book has a lot of rhetoric about “values” but not a lot of concrete policy prescriptions. Worse, Ms. Slaughter often discusses challenges as if they were primarily a matter of “values” rather than specific challenges, requiring different responses in different circumstances.

So the Bush administration comes in for a lot of criticism for disregarding the opinions and concerns of other nations. We offended others by going to Iraq in 2003, by refusing to embrace the Kyoto treaty on global warming, by practicing torture on terror suspects at Guantanamo, etc., etc. Ms. Slaughter has little to say about the intentions of China, with its disturbing military buildup. She has little to say about the prospects for a long-term modus vivendi with militant Islam. In practice, the “other nations” she seems most concerned about accommodating are in Europe — that is, Western Europe.

Ms. Slaughter sums up her program for a more orderly world: “We may reject global government but then we must ensure that national governments have a meaningful voice in global decision-making processes that directly affect their citizens.” Would the “voice” of foreign nations still be “meaningful” if America always retained the right, in the end, to reject foreign demands? Or does “meaningful voice” require the construction of international forums in which America can be outvoted and must submit to the determinations of the majority? Ms. Slaughter is characteristically vague about what her prescriptions for expanding international law and governance would actually mean for us.

But the good news is that, for all her gauzy rhetoric, Ms. Slaughter does at least acknowledge some realities that are the daily concerns of someone such as Secretary of State Rice. Ms. Slaughter does not pretend that terrorist violence will cease if America only consults more with others, and she is not bashful about calling practitioners of random violence “terrorists.” We must, she says, not only resist terrorism “with everything we have” but “must also condemn the values that make terrorism thinkable.” She speaks respectfully of Israel’s efforts to balance security measures against safeguards for human rights.

At the same time, Ms. Slaughter favors expanding international trade. She does not pretend that economic “globalization” is, in itself, the cause of poverty. She favors American efforts to promote democracy in other nations. She advises that America attend to the claims of fellow democracies before worrying about the governments that happen, at any particular moment, to dominate the United Nations and even suggests we build up alternate forums when the U.N. is dysfunctional.

If you are optimistic, you might imagine a Secretary Slaughter guiding American policy in the next few years in a reasonably responsible way. You might even think it a good sign that she says so little in this book about current options in Iraq. She certainly doesn’t suggest that all would be well if we simply withdrew the provocative presence of American forces in a “sectarian civil war.”

Ms. Slaughter even chides critics on the left for engaging in “vitriolic” attacks on President Bush’s policy and allowing “partisanship” to get “out of control.” The result, she protests, was that the country did not get the benefit of a serious debate on the merits regarding Mr. Bush’s new policy of a military “surge” to stabilize Baghdad.

Still, it is somewhat disheartening that, if you want to be eligible for a high foreign policy post in a Democratic administration, you must — on the evidence of this volume — refrain from associating “the American idea” with the continuing effort to defend a nascent Iraqi democracy from nihilist violence.

Mr. Rabkin is a professor of law at George Mason University.