David Aaron Miller, public policy scholar for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, tells Newsmax he’s worried that America needs a more realistic image of its own power.

“We’ve seen what a decade of overreach can bring,” he says. “We have primary core interests. We need to define what they are, we need to protect them, but we cannot democratize the rest of the world.”

Miller, author of The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, says America must “pick its spots” much more carefully, and invest money where there’s a realistic hope of success.

“We have a broken house in this country, and that house needs to be fixed,” says Miller, who served as a Middle East peace negotiator during the Clinton administration. “Barack Obama was not elected to be the war president and frankly he wasn’t elected to be a peace president. At a time when we’re presiding over the worst economic and financial crisis in 70 years, a crisis that could have profound social implications as well, we just need to understand what we can do in the world, and what we can’t.”