When President-elect Barack Obama announced his foreign policy team on Dec. 1, he listed four "American values" that his government will pursue: "Democracy and justice; opportunity and unyielding hope -- because American values are America's greatest export to the world."

All that was part of Obama's campaign promise to restore American moral standing abroad. Right now, it's still just words. It's time to ask what kind of nuts and bolts policies actually would put those values into action.

Clearly, as Obama reiterated after the election, the first step must be to undo the long list of abuses that have tarnished our national honor -- aggressive war, Guantanamo, officially sanctioned torture and so on. But that's just playing defense, trying to remedy our past wrongs and lessen our sense of shame.

Obama is promising to go further -- to export opportunity and hope as well. And that is why, as president, Obama will have good reason to look at U.S. refugee policy and to make it a centerpiece of his international agenda.

In European elections, rising xenophobia leads politicians to compete to show their hostility to asylum seekers. But Americans are supposed to be different. As Obama told Europeans in Berlin in July, "Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom -- indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours." read more