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You could feel a frisson of excitement and dread last night around the rococo halls of the Quai d'Orsay, the palatial home of the French foreign ministry, as the staff welcomed their leftist-activist-minister back from his conservative government's peace mission to the troubled banks of the Potomac.

There was a sense – among a ministerial staff made up mainly of former human-rights activists whose casual back-patting manner resembles early episodes of The West Wing more than the grave world of traditional French diplomacy – that history is being made here. In a set of gestures culminating in a rapprochement, almost an entente cordiale, with George W. Bush this week, France had entered into a bold and risky experiment, one the whole world should watch.

The author of the experiment is Bernard Kouchner, the 67-year-old physician, Socialist Party stalwart and founder of the charity Doctors Without Borders, who this summer became President Nicolas Sarkozy's unlikely choice as foreign minister. In the past dozen weeks, in a whirl of dramatic trips to every continent, Mr. Kouchner has outlined a mission that is as improbable as everything else in his life: to unite Europe and the United States in muscular humanitarian missions to improve the world, without immediate regard for national interest.

The Kouchner project is a dramatic bid for political idealism – possibly the last time any major nation will make such a bid for a very long time. The Iraq war has seen to that: As an attempt at projecting democratic ideals onto the world, with backing by an awkward group of idealists on the right and the left, it has failed so grotesquely as to discredit humanitarian idealism, possibly for another generation.

Mr. Kouchner's central and possibly fatal dilemma is that the principles he played a key role in creating over the past four decades may have created a disaster that has rendered his principles unworkable.

Self-interest on the rise

The world is retreating into spheres of national interest, and humanitarian actions have become very hard to sell. In the U.S., weakened and neutered by its wars, both political parties seem to be taking an inward, self-protecting turn. Russia and China are engaged in expensive missions that serve only their own ends, often with terrible human, economic and ecological costs. The European Union is having a long moment of indecision.

Bernard Kouchner, the man who invented the concepts of humanitarian intervention and the “duty to protect” and made them part of United Nations doctrine, who persuaded nations to stick their noses and sometimes their guns into the business of others, may be uniquely positioned to perform the judo-flip necessary to put the world's powers to work on this moment's gravest humanitarian problems. He certainly believes he is. Having spent 40 years close to both the dictators and the democrats who run the world today, he may have a reasonable claim.

He also seems to believe, according to his staff, that he can do the contortions needed to keep his project's two worst enemies at bay: Nicolas Sarkozy, who could force him out of office at any moment, and the United States, which could ruin everything with a short-sighted spasm of violence, such as bombing Iran.

“I know the difficulties of doing this,” he explained recently. “Americans and Europeans today are listened to with suspicion as soon as we start talking about democracy and human rights. It is a terrible irony. The risk now is that the messenger may have killed the message, that the very name of human rights entails rejection and suspicion among the very people it should help.”

There are plenty of people, “realists” and others, who believe the world is better off if nations protect their interests and mind their own business.

But, if Mr. Kouchner rescues idealism from its current morass, it could make a huge difference in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where the world's last remaining tyrants are being protected by those great powers that have abandoned idealism altogether.

Mr. Kouchner's project is more than a Quixotic tragi-farce thanks to French history. When Charles de Gaulle proclaimed “une certaine idée de la France,” he was giving the world a third pole, between the Cold War superpowers that would happily do business and make peace with either side, or both.

This has made France a potential site of principled neutrality; more often, though, it has led to self-interest. With the major powers watching their own turf, atrocities occurred in the shadows.

He altered basic UN doctrine

In the 1960s, Mr. Kouchner, a doctor on the far left, went into the business of rescuing people. At first, he worked for the Red Cross. But he rejected its doctrine of neutrality after he decided that many crises in Africa and Asia were political. He ripped the cross from his arm (symbolically, at least) and denounced regimes that were causing mass murders.

He launched Doctors Without Borders to intervene in conflicts, often without permission, in the name of humanitarian aid. When his actions became too heavy-handed for that organization in the 1980s, he quit and founded Doctors of the World and became a minor cabinet minister in François Mitterrand's Socialist government. He then won the passage of two resolutions that dissolved the old UN idea that nations should only use their armies when another country has been invaded, creating a “duty to protect.” As the U.S. writer Paul Berman wrote in 2005, Mr. Kouchner “had pretty much invented the concept of humanitarian invention as something more than a once-in-a-blue-moon exceptional act, and had popularized the idea.”

Those resolutions were used to take military action in the Balkans in the 1990s and became the basis for the UN call for an Afghanistan invasion in 2001. Their language, at least, became the language of the Kosovo and Iraq wars. In Kosovo, Mr. Kouchner became the UN envoy. In Iraq, he was horrified that his ideas had been turned into the cause of a calamity.

Earlier this year, the former U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke described the dilemma for Mr. Kouchner and others: “The veterans of the European New Left, having succeeded in changing the rules for intervention through their arguments over the decades and their efforts in the Balkans during the 1990s, found themselves, like everyone else, up against a terrible reality in Iraq – a reality so desperate that it threatened to discredit the noble ideas that had led some of those veterans of the New Left, though not all of them, to support the original intervention.”

The concept of the obligation of nations to come to the aid of people suffering atrocities at the hands of their governments can never quite have the same meaning.

So far we have seen Mr. Kouchner stepping into Burma, offering the regime a set of rewards and threats. He has tried to prevent Syria from ruining another Lebanese election with violence (“Do I believe them? I want to believe them,” he told French radio this week. “Have I made a mistake? We'll see. Is this a gamble? Yes, and it's a risky gamble.”) Above all, he has done a decent job of assembling Euro-African forces to intervene in Chad and Sudan, breaking through barriers that had prevented these vital actions. And he has tried (and so far not succeeded) to get Europe to impose tougher sanctions on Iran, cutting off all banking relations.

Warlike on Iran?

Once, he uttered a sentence that seemed to suggest support for bombing Iran. Did he say it? His staff says no. Did he mean it? Nicolas Sarkozy said no. But, privately, people close to Mr. Kouchner say that the Iraq failure has taught him that, when the major nations create a realistic perception that they are about to do something violent, negotiations suddenly start working.

There is the chief promise of Mr. Kouchner's ideological judo, his attempt to use France's stance in the centre and its throw-weight to push diverse nations behind principle. He might end up creating a world with a humbled U.S. and an empowered EU pursuing common goals, at least on certain key international tragedies.

Much could go wrong. Mr. Kouchner is risking not just failure but ridicule: A popular French puppet-satire show constantly portrays him with a sack of rice on his shoulder, a camera-hogging rock-star humanitarian. The Canadian general Roméo Dallaire described him similarly in his memoir Shake Hands with the Devil as a man of symbolic gesture but little lasting power. Besides, he is a leftist in a government whose immigration minister is carrying out mass expulsions that Mr. Kouchner has called inhumane – which could lead to a showdown.

He could be a failure, or he could be a token. But in a world where principle is shrinking into a self-protective fetal position, the loud, proud, egotistical man who is trying to walk above it all is worth watching. Or, as Mr. Kouchner put it recently: “I have no recipe except one in politics: to continue, to continue, to be obstinate, to be obstinate, to never abandon an issue as long as there remains a small shred of hope.”