Kim Holmes is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. He's also the author of the Liberty's Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21st Century, a thoughtful exploration of what American leadership should look like in the coming years.

Since leadership requires followers, Holmes put together a kind of "focus group" of leading foreign diplomats. One of them, from an important and loyal U.S. ally, spoke for the group when he said, "follow me doesn't work any more."

The two obvious reactions to this statement are (1) ignore it and proceed as usual or (2) confess to prior arrogance and attempt to make things up to the rest of the world (this is what Barack Obama has in mind when he says we need to negotiate without pre-conditions with enemy dictators like Ahmadinejad in order to compensate for the "arrogance" of the Bush administration). For Holmes, neither approach is satisfactory, and his book can be viewed as an effort to find a non-trivial "third way."

That’s not an easy task. In the end Holmes’ answer can be summarized as “win and persuade.”

Winning, to be sure, is enormously desirable (though eventually it can produce its own backlash). Ronald Reagan was able to preserve a fraying alliance with Western Europe only after it became clear that the U.S. was well on the way to winning the Cold War. But winning the war on terror probably involves a long and drawn out process. And, though we may succeed in Iraq, this success will not necessarily be viewed as the kind of “win” that reinforces our claim to world leadership.

Persuasion is obviously a key element in leadership. But this fact has hardly been lost on the Bush administration. Unlike critics on the left, Holmes does not appear to deny this fact; he argues instead that Bush hasn’t done as well as he should when it comes to persuasion. Yet it seems to me that when Bush has failed to persuade, it’s usually been because foreign leaders simply do not share his view of the world or because they legitimately see their interests as diverging from ours. When one considers how differently our own Democratic party sees the world, it’s difficult to believe that leftist and center-left governments (never mind authoritarian Islamic regimes) can consistently be persuaded to follow the liberty agenda-based leadership that Holmes (as his book title suggests) advocates. At the end of the day, then, our alternatives will sometimes boil down to saying “follow me” or capitulating.

Holmes wisely is not prepared to capitulate. He insists that American leadership must be based on our core value of liberty. Otherwise, we become “the chairman of the board of international consensus.” That consensus will often represent a betrayal of what we stand for. Moreover, it will neither inspire the world to retain us as "chairman" nor inspire Americans to make the sacrifices that tend to go with that role.