Forget the personalities. Let's talk about core national policies, especially those that involve America's place in the world arena.

At this moment, we don't know who is going to be the next president of the United States. In my view, John McCain is too old (and a little tired), Barack Obama is too inexperienced, and Hillary Clinton is too jaded and too ruthless. I like parts of each of them. I can live with any of the three. Any one of them, in my view, represents an improvement.

We may not yet know whom we are going to get, but I certainly know what I most want.

First and foremost, let's stop torturing prisoners. Period. The United States signed all four of the Geneva Conventions (1864, 1906, 1929, 1949), which prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture," but also "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." That would seem to cover the human pyramids at Abu Ghraib.

Yes, we live in perilous times. Yes, there are bad people in the world who are determined to destroy us. We know that some people are willing to use methods that are utterly repugnant to the idea of civilization (so shall we join them?). I know we cannot afford to be naive. But America is only America if it adheres to the highest ideals of the world, standards we have repeatedly and explicitly agreed to by way of binding international legal agreements, standards ratified by more than 194 nations worldwide. Why would we ever settle for less?

And let's not descend into casuistry to try to carve out some ambiguous legitimacy for waterboarding, belly slapping, naked exposure to cold temperatures, and other odious procedures. If Amnesty International and the Red Cross say it's torture, it's torture. Period. Any American leader who says our interrogation methods aren't torture should therefore volunteer to have them used on him or herself. That - in a nutshell - is the standard of humane treatment enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.

No more renditions. That's where we turn over a suspect to a "friendly regime," like Bulgaria or Egypt, and let them do the torturing on our behalf. The use of rendition enables us to declare righteously that we don't torture, at the same instant we are cheerfully delivering up a suspect to a regime that does not share even our diluted moral qualms.

Let's close Guantanamo. We shouldn't have a base on sovereign Cuban soil anyway, and this one has become a symbol of what the rest of the world despises about America. Even President Bush has said he wants to close Guantanamo. The Supreme Court has declared that, even in the Age of Terrorism, the United States cannot just lock up foreign nationals and deny them access to legal representation and due process. The principle of habeas corpus (that people cannot be detained without having access to some mechanism that can enable them to confront their accusers, explain their actions, and demand fair treatment) is one of the foundations of civilization. Why would we want to jettison a principle that central to our national ideals?

It really bothers me that we have reached the point where we believe there is one standard of human rights for American citizens, and a lower standard for other peoples. The Founding Fathers were not trying to carve out a secure space for the American people only. On the contrary, they were attempting to enshrine the rights of humankind - universal rights that are not granted by governments but rather recognized and cherished by all enlightened governments. Under that universalist code, an Islamic fundamentalist is as entitled to due process as a soccer mom from Salt Lake City.

Let's stop talking about the world as if it were a John Wayne movie. Terms like "axis of evil," "evil doers," "bad guys" and "you are either with us or against us" oversimplify the rich complexity of the world situation in dangerous ways. No nation is entirely good or entirely bad, just as no individual is pure saint or pure sinner. Besides, these labels depend entirely on the eye of the beholder. We rightly object when the Iranians call us the "Great Satan" or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls George Bush "the devil." It's not that there is an equal legitimacy to all national styles or points of view, but there is rarely, if ever, a total void of legitimacy in another's nation's behavior. If I were Iran, I'd want nuclear weapons, too.

The world does not need any further polarization. We Americans must rise to a nuanced, mature, thoughtful and tolerant global consciousness. Enough name calling already.

Let's rejoin the United Nations, which is just one way in which we need to rejoin the global community of nations, including the International Courts of Justice and global environmental protocols. It was a terrible mistake to go to war against Iraq against the advice of our closest friends in the world: Germany, France, Canada, among others. Our closest friends pleaded with us to keep the pressure on Saddam Hussein, but to slow down until we could be absolutely sure we were not doing something rash.

How we ridiculed them for their caution.

If there is some threat to us somewhere that is so grave that it really calls for war, we will always be able to persuade the U.N. to bless our actions. If we cannot persuade our closest friends of the necessity of our actions, we are almost certainly in the wrong.

I agree that the U.N. is a very imperfect institution badly in need of reforms, some of them fundamental. So let's jump in and use our power and what's left of our prestige to forge a new, more responsible, more effective U.N. Unilateralism must cease.

Absent a specific court order involving a specific, identifiable threat, let's end all surveillance against American citizens immediately.

These are the things that ought to be done not in the first 1,000 days of the next administration, but in the first 100 days. Indeed, a prohibition on torture, rendition and unauthorized surveillance can be accomplished in the first 10 days.

Let's begin the regeneration of America's moral leadership in the world by looking unblinkingly into the mirror of the enlightenment principles by which we began our extraordinary national experiment.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)