The official position of the United States is that Europe should allow Turkey to join the European Union. Turkey’s entry would give its citizens the right to travel freely to any other EU member state. This prodding to Europeans to embrace Turkey comes from the same country that is building a 700-mile-long wall along its border with Mexico.

When the South Korean government bailed out Hyundai Electronics Industries in 2001, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution urging the Bush administration “to assure that the unlawful bailout by the Republic of Korea is stopped.” This July, the U.S. Congress approved a far larger bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants. The U.S. government has often pressured poor African countries ravaged by HIV/AIDS into not buying the cheaper generic drugs offered by manufacturers in Brazil or India. Yet, when the United States faced a potential health crisis during the anthrax attacks in 2001, Tommy Thompson, then the secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that the United States was ready to buy generic versions of Cipro, an anti-anthrax drug owned by Bayer, from manufacturers in India if the German drug company refused to drop its price.

These are just a few examples from a long list of contradictions, inconsistencies, and double standards that are all too common in the way the United States interacts with the world. U.S. officials usually justify the double standards by arguing that the world is too messy and that there is no one-size-fits-all foreign policy. Different situations demand different responses, they say. Perhaps so, critics argue, but cozying up to oil-producing tyrants while trumpeting the spread of democracy and the protection of human rights has less to do with global messiness than with...