For all its achievements, the West was increasingly faulted for its deficiencies at home and abroad.

The very title of Michael Kimmage’s work of intellectual history—“The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy”—comes with a shock of recognition. Why, yes, who in the realm of foreign policy now speaks of “the West”? It’s gone. Where did it go? Come to think of it, we more or less abandoned it, didn’t we?

Intellectual history is a tricky genre. In addition to describing what human beings have done, it attempts to discern what people have thought about what they were doing as they did it: how their conceptualization of the world around them shaped them. To try to make sense of this, historians examine what people have said. But there’s no escaping the problem of things that go without saying: the unspoken context of the times, often little understood by those operating within its confines.

Mr. Kimmage rightly believes that he has hold of one of the most important concepts of the previous century, the idea of the West, and capably traces its evolution and context. He purports to limit himself to its role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, but in truth he ranges more widely. He writes with keen observation, for example, on the proliferation of neoclassical and neo-Gothic architecture in the United States after the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago—part of America’s renewed involvement with Europe. He also draws on such African-American thinkers as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, not primarily for their critique of American foreign policy but for the insight arising from their sense of being in the West but not entirely of it. The history of the idea of the West is also, as Mr. Kimmage shows, a history of the critique of the West.

The book proceeds more or less chronologically, charting first the rise of the modern idea of the West through its Cold War heyday; then the emerging critique of the West; and finally its dissolution into the universalism of the “liberal international order.” 

In what Mr. Kimmage calls the Columbian Republic—the period that followed what Frederick Jackson Turner described as the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century—the U.S. began to turn away from its own westward expansion and actively cultivate its European connections, including the shared inheritance from Greece and Rome. The U.S., at last a global power, was at the forefront of Western civilization, or perhaps of civilization as such.

The second period takes us from 1919, when Woodrow Wilson failed to win congressional approval for American membership in the League of Nations, through 1945, the point at which the global dominance of the United States became apparent to everyone. World War II, Mr. Kimmage argues, was fought not only to defeat Hitler but to expunge the fascist blight that had overtaken two historical centers of Western civilization, Berlin and Rome. The war that the U.S. waged on Nazi Germany was fierce and brutal—yet not as brutal, Mr. Kimmage notes, as the war against Japan, a land not of the West. 

In the years before and after the war, America’s leading universities designed programs in Western civilization, unapologetically designating the great books to be read by students so they could understand their place in it. Mr. Kimmage bookends the next period of his history with the publication of William McNeill’s influential “The Rise of the West” in 1963. By that date, the West also stood in opposition to the East, the communist bloc behind Moscow’s Iron Curtain. This East-West dimension persisted through the end of the Cold War.

But, notes Mr. Kimmage, McNeill’s book actually appeared “at the end of an era in American politics and foreign policy.” The triumphalist view of the West found itself being increasingly interrogated for its deficiencies at home and abroad—for racism, imperialism, colonialism and what Columbia University’s Edward Said, in the late 1970s, would identify as “Orientalism,” the patronizing and dismissive Western view of other cultures. The Vietnam War began under the guidance of “the best and the brightest” (as David Halberstam dubbed them) from elite universities that were on board with the progressive purposes of the U.S. government. By Said’s time, the universities had emerged as bastions of a thorough critique of the West and its leading power, the United States.

Partly because of the increasing weight of this critique, and partly because of the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the utility of speaking of “the West” in foreign policy reached an end. Mr. Kimmage finds it telling that President George W. Bush felt a need to walk back his use of the term “crusade” to describe the coming U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks. It was deemed insensitive, and even the leading architects of the “Global War on Terror” drew a line at insensitivity of this sort.

It is to Mr. Kimmage’s immense credit that he manages to maintain a firm hold on two ropes pulling in opposite directions: First, critics of the West were right about many matters that had previously been ignored or played down: the history of racism and disregard for women, the settler genocides and imperialism. Second, the West got a number of big things right as well: in the realm of foreign policy, the need to defeat fascism, to resist communism, and to promote (however inconsistently and imperfectly) the spread of freedom. There was as well the emergence of a vision of political life based on mutual respect—a proposition that contains within it a basis for the criticism of existing practice and therefore self-improvement. 

Racism and conquest have been ubiquitous in politics. The political wherewithal to call them out and try to overcome them has not. A frank acknowledgment of Western shortcomings, past and present, as Mr. Kimmage demonstrates so persuasively, makes sense only in the context of an appreciation of the singular Western contribution to human flourishing.

This article was originally published on April 24th in The Wall Street Journal