Uncle Sam is on a values crusade abroad, promoting democracy and human rights while damning terrorism and drugs. The public should beware when the values crusade coincides with a demonizing crusade that divides the world into good guys versus bad guys. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, author of "The Logic of World Power" and other books on foreign affairs, is professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Americans may have serious qualms about our values at home but when it comes to foreign affairs, the U.S. is on a values crusade. Look almost anywhere on the globe and you'll find Uncle Sam preaching the virtues of democracy and human rights and the evils of drugs and terrorism.

To noted political scientists like the late Hans Morgenthau, however, any foreign policy based on moral values instead of concrete interests is a recipe for disaster. An ideological foreign policy runs the risk of getting us into shooting wars because of emotional values rather than rational reasons.

Yet members of Congress across a wide spectrum from left to right eagerly support America's current values crusade. Even those who favor separating human rights from trade issues on the China front voted overwhelmingly for the U.S. to assure Taiwan's security. And advocates of normalizing relations with Cuba reversed gears in favor of the economic embargo following the shooting down of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes. In the new bipartisan consensus, those countries that don't do the right thing are publicly chided or punished. Those that persevere in their evil ways risk being branded rogues -- or worse, demonized.

In an election year, when politicians know that most voters are mainstream middle-class Americans it is good politics to vote for democracy and human rights and against terrorism and drugs. But what the politicians should realize is that pushing moralism abroad also heightens the risks of war, especially when the rhetoric escalates to demonization. Rogues are, after all, loose cannons that can be brought back into the fold. But when the U.S. starts demonizing other countries -- dividing the world into good guys versus bad guys -- the public should be on the alert of possible wars to come.

In the mid-1930s, an isolationist President Roosevelt pushed through the Neutrality Act to keep the country out of another European war. But as alarm grew over the growing power of rogue countries -- Hitler's Germany and imperial Japan -- FDR and the American news media launched a crusade against both for crushing of democracy and human rights.

The crusade mobilized a lot of sentiment at home and abroad but failed to stop the war machines in either country. Only when FDR demonized both as evil empires was the stage set for war. The Japanese decided to attack Pearl Harbor because they were convinced the U.S., through FDR's oil embargo, was out to destroy them. Hitler reached the same conclusion and declared war on the U.S. barely 24 hours after Pearl Harbor. For the U.S., combining a values crusade with a war against demonic enemies produced a powerful motivational effect that resulted in a smashing victory.

Today the U.S. is in a position similar to that in the late 1930s. Economic troubles, while nowhere as deep as the Great Depression, are causing worry all around. There is also a sense of American decline in the face of vigorous new foreign ideologies and new rogue nations. The hope in the wake of the end of the Cold War that the great powers would work together for peace has faded.

Until recently, the roster of rogue nations included only smaller ones like Libya, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea. Today, Iran has joined the list, replacing Iraq, and China and Russia seem definite possibilities for future inclusion. As the anti-Western ideology of Islam revolution spreads in West Asia and East Asia, especially China, pursues models of economic take-off that defy the Western modernization models of the IMF and World Bank, a Spenglerian sense is taking hold that Western civilization is declining with new barbarians pounding on the gates.

The Clinton administration is using the values crusade to mobilize the West and its friends elsewhere in the world to pull together against these new threats. Iran is now moving from rogue to demon status, much as Iraq did in 1990, while rogues like Libya and Sudan are being pressured to repent or else. Lebanon is being warned to warm up to the Arab-Israeli peace process lest it too be branded a rogue.

With the U.S. now "directly involved in the anti-terrorist struggle in Israel, the Palestinian territories and beyond their boundaries," in the words of the Arab-language newspaper Sharq al-Ausat, the crusade is upping its rhetoric on West Asia from rogue-branding to demonization. In East Asia demonization is still a way off. China may be a rogue but, like its friends Malaysia and Singapore, it is also fiercely anti-terrorist and drug dealers are swiftly executed. All three are also awesome economic powers.

But as the lessons from the thirties show, once demonization joins forces with a values crusade in American foreign policy, war crises could be looming on the horizon.