Everyone from American scholars to foreign statesmen finds American foreign policy very puzzling. And so the basic tenor of all commentaries on this policy, at any time and from any source, tends to be critical. When was the last time you read an enthusiastic endorsement of American foreign policy? I have no such recollection.

The truth is that American foreign policy is necessarily always perplexing. This has nothing to do with the inadequacies of our presidents or State Departments. Such inadequacies surely exist but they are, as it were, built into their mission and the way they are compelled to execute it. In short, confusion is inescapable. The reason is that American foreign policy is truly exceptional, formed in a way that is quite different from that of other nations.

One does not ordinarily find French or British or German foreign policy to be the subject of such permanent, agitated criticism among those countries' people. That is because the European tradition -- indeed, all political traditions other than the American -- has tended to regard foreign policy as the preserve of the state. The British, French and German foreign offices do not hold our kind of daily televised press briefings, in which newsmen compete to come up with embarrassing questions. They would like to see the U.S. follow their example. But the U.S. cannot, because our foreign policy is in thrall to popular opinion. Our foreign policy is uniquely democratic, for better or worse. And our popular opinion is profoundly ambivalent when it comes to foreign affairs. It has been so since the founding of the Republic.

The ambivalence can be summed up this way: The American people see their nation as being an exceptional one, with a very special mission in the world. This mission has an ineradicable moral component -- our foreign policy is supposed to make the world a better place for humanity to inhabit. There is consensus on this. But there is no consensus on how this is to be accomplished. The division is basically threefold, though with some discordant tendencies within each fold.

Briefly, there are those who believe that being an exemplary "city on a hill" should suffice, except when a very narrowly defined "national interest" is clearly at issue; this is what we loosely refer to as isolationism. There are others, however, who think that only an activist participation in world affairs and the creation of a "new world order" dominated by international organizations that promise "collective security" can satisfy our moral ambitions. And there are still others -- mainly academics and professionals -- who are skeptical about "American exceptionalism" to begin with, and who therefore would like to see American foreign policy be consistently "pragmatic" and "realistic," with our national interest defined in traditional "balance of power" terms.

All three currents are now visible in American discourse. The "isolationist" impulse seems irrepressible, even among those Americans who believe that our national destiny is to be the world's mightiest power. Those quotation marks are justified, because there are almost no "isolationists" who will not make an occasional exception for the Western hemisphere, where they can foresee reasons for righteous intervention. And it is worth recalling that it was precisely among the isolationist-minded that anticommunist enthusiasm during the Cold War was most manifest. Being the world's greatest power inexorably implies resistance to those who challenge this status. A true isolationist would have only a literal conception of national security -- a purely defensive definition. Very few such people actually exist. Pat Buchanan sometimes seems like one, but his innate belligerency -- another popular American trait -- belies the appearance. In power begins inescapable responsibilities and challenges.

What can fairly be called the Wilsonian impulse dominates our State Department and such influential post-World War I organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations. Indeed, practically all privately financed membership organizations devoted exclusively to foreign policy are Wilsonian. There are not many of them, and their memberships may not be large, but they do attract former foreign-affairs officers, often high and distinguished officials, who are presumed to speak with some authority and who get a disproportionate amount of respectful media coverage.

I say disproportionate because in the past decades the Wilsonian impulse has grown weaker. Very few politicians these days go around saying nice things about the United Nations, while the quotient of nasty references has grown astronomically. All those quaint phrases -- "a world without war" or "open covenants openly arrived at," even a universal right to "self-determination" -- may still occasionally turn up in commencement addresses, but they are feeble and echoless. A casual reference to the Wilsonian vision as "utopian" rarely provokes vigorous dissent. But the past weighs heavily on American diplomacy, and the State Department does not find it easy to disengage itself publicly from those old commitments to this vision.

Privately and unofficially, it's another matter. All American administrations, without exception, find themselves discreetly wandering down a third track. The media and policymakers usually describe this as "pragmatism"; academics speak more bluntly of "realism" or "neorealism." Pragmatism is very much in the American vein, suggesting as it does the adaptation of ideals to reality, not the abandonment of those ideals. Still, this does lead to recurrent denunciations by righteous moralists of American foreign policy as hypocritical, which it inevitably and necessarily is.

To escape this trap, some policy analysts have forged yet another path, one that affirms commitment to American political and social ideals, which are not always universalist ideals, as the essential guides for our policy. Unlike Wilsonianism, this point of view is nationalist and unilateralist, looking back to Theodore Roosevelt rather than to Woodrow Wilson. It is an ingenious effort to wed realism to idealism, in a uniquely American way. But whether the real world is any more hospitable to American ideals than to the universalist ideals of the U.N. is not at all clear. One suspects that this mixture of idealism and "neorealism" will in its own turn have to plead the exigencies of "pragmatism" at crucial moments.

In the end the fundamental problem for America is that its foreign policy is democratic. This is something the world has not witnessed since ancient Athens, where a democratic foreign policy led to one disaster after another. On the other hand, Athens was never the great power the U.S. is today, and its version of democracy had far fewer ways of shaping, refining and even sometimes thwarting popular opinion. Still, American foreign policy will surely remain, as it always has been, an exasperating enigma to the rest of the world as well as to our academic analysts, who will never cease to believe that a foreign policy should be analytically coherent.

So we muddle along, intervening spasmodically in various parts of the world, with mixed results. The Gulf War witnessed a most fortuitous confluence of moralistic rhetoric ("resist aggression") and realistic motives (involving oil and Middle East stability), though even in this case the opposition to intervention was stronger than one would have anticipated. In Bosnia, it was media outrage at Serbian atrocities that propelled our reluctant intervention, and no serious person can believe that we are there to establish a peaceful multiethnic Bosnia. We would have much preferred to let our NATO allies cope with Bosnia, but they seem incapable of coping with anything -- a fact that our official rhetoric covers up as best it can.

It is because of this internal conflict within the American soul that every administration is attracted to economic sanctions as against military intervention. In most cases these sanctions are ineffectual, but they do give the appearance of attentive action and only a few interest groups pay much attention to them.

With the end of the Cold War, what we really need is an obvious ideological and threatening enemy, one worthy of our mettle, one that can unite us in opposition. Isn't that what the most successful movie of the year, "Independence Day," is telling us? Where are our aliens when we most need them?

Mr. Kristol , an American Enterprise Institute fellow, coedits The Public Interest and publishes The National Interest.