Last night on 60 Minutes, Barack Obama pledged to take steps that would help “regain America’s moral stature in the world.” He was talking about prohibiting the torture of detainees and closing the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The first is a fine idea; the second may or may not be. But neither the waterboarding of three known al Qaeda members, nor the fattening up of non-state combatants in the plushest facilities they’ve ever enjoyed have a thing to do with “America’s moral stature in the world.”

These do: Risking and losing American lives in an effort to liberate 60 million or so Muslims and Christians from religious and secular tyrannies, giving 1.3 million Africans free HIV antiretroviral drugs, providing life-saving medications to another million and a half globally, giving $350 million to eradicate tropical diseases, giving $841 million in aid to Tsunami-ravaged Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. And that’s a very abbreviated list of the humanitarian accomplishments of the George W. Bush administration.

Obama is free to worry about the total of five minutes that three terrorists have spent with wet towels over their faces, and he can try to figure out a more sensible way to hold suspected jihadists who are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution or to those of the Geneva Convention. But his confusion of PR with morality is worrying. If he thinks a nation ensures its moral footing by signing off on a couple of token gestures, he needs to look a little closer not only at what we do, but at who we are. Morality in American policy is not determined by what Europe or Asia judge to be ethical. If it were, we’d still have a country marked by segregation, industrial slavery, and religious servitude. If Obama’s sense of moral stature takes cues from the global peanut gallery, the whole world can count on a lot more suffering in the coming years.