NONE TOO QUICK ON THE UPTAKE:

Rogue State America: Has America become a rogue state? (John B. Judis, 1/17/07, TNR Online)

What exactly are we doing in the Horn of Africa, where we have encouraged the Christian government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and replace its Islamic government? As far as I can tell, we have violated international law, committed war crimes, helped Al Qaeda recruit new members, and involved ourselves in a guerrilla war that could last decades. It’s Iraq writ small. And it can’t be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

There’s an old principle of international law, going back to the seventeenth century, against one nation violating the sovereignty of another. It was often breached, but, after two world wars, it was enshrined in the United Nations charter. We criticized the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and justified the first Gulf war on these grounds. The purpose of this principle has been to prevent wars that could arise if more powerful countries simply took it into their hands to dominate smaller, less powerful ones. […]

In the 1990s, foreign policy experts, eager to identify a new enemy, hit upon the concept of a “rogue state.” A rogue state operated outside the bounds of international norms and had to be restrained. The obvious candidates at the time were Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. But the Bush administration has turned the United States itself into a rogue state. Tough-minded conservatives, flexing their “muscular” inclinations from comfortable sinecures in Washington, may dismiss concerns about international law and war crimes as inventions of silly panty-waist liberals. But these inventions, which, in the modern era, were championed by Theodore Roosevelt, were meant to protect Americans as well as other peoples from the wars and the inhumanity that prevailed for thousands of years. We ignore them at their peril, whether in Haditha or Ras Kamboni.

Mr. Judis is correct about the intervention being a mistake vis-a-vis the Somali people, but if he’s just now noticing that we’re a rogue state and sovereignty is a dead letter he doesn’t pay much attention to American history.

LIVE REDEFINING:

If you’re going to be near a computer this evening, you can access an interview about the book on:

Twin State Journal, a live radio program that broadcasts from 6-7 in the evening on WNTK Talk Radio from Lebanon, NH

http://www.wntk.com/newsite/content/listen.php

LOFTY COMPANY:

The Best Books of 2006 (Steven Martinovich, January 4, 2007, Enter Stage Right)

Changing the rules: A nation’s sovereignty is neither absolute or non-existent, argues Orrin Judd’s Redefining Sovereignty: The Battle for the Moral High Ground in a Changing World, a collection of essays from thinkers on the issue. Steve Martinovich reviews his efforts […]

The last days of manliness: If being a man needs defending in today’s world, writes Bernard Chapin, then Harvey C. Mansfield’s Manliness does a superb job

The lessons of love: The Book of Trouble: A Romance could have been one of those typical romance memoirs but Steve Martinovich says Ann Marlowe elevated her effort far past that

Make your

SAME WAR, DIFFERENT BATTLE:

From Kennedy’s Cold War to the War on Terror: Gareth Jenkins looks for continuities in American foreign policy from the 1960s to the 2000s. (Gareth Jenkins, June 2006, History Today)

‘The United States is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War. The 20th century witnessed the triumph of freedom over the threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion.’
–US National Security Strategy, March 2006

The US invasion of Iraq of 2003 is viewed by many as a historical watershed, as ushering in a new era in which the world’s only superpower feels unconstrained in resorting to pre-emptive military action to achieve its strategic goals. For the first time in more than half a century the term imperialism has regained common currency, and there is renewed interest in understanding the European scramble for colonies in the late nineteenth century.

No doubt the period we are entering does in many ways mark a new historical phase. Global power relations are accommodating rapidly to new economic realities – the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the rise of China and India and the emergence of structural weaknesses in the US economy. Nevertheless, as George Bush recently reminded us, there are many continuities with the past half century of the American exercise of power.

There have been continual assaults on the sovereignty of Third World countries, backed by covert and overt military interventions, throughout the period since the Cold War was launched. […]

The ideological underpinnings of America’s projection of its global power are very different today from what they were in Kennedy’s time. During the Cold War, Washington could at least point to an enemy that controlled a huge state armed with nuclear weapons. Today one is asked to believe that life as we know it is threatened from a cave in Afghanistan, or by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction that no one could find, or by a civil nuclear programme in Iran that could, one day perhaps, morph into a military programme.

The ideological underpinnings never waver, only the

Bookviews (Alan Caruba, May 2006)

In a world of many international organizations and treaties, the issue of American sovereignty was never more important. That’s why Redefining Sovereignty, edited by Orrin C. Judd, ($29.95, Smith and Kraus, Lyme, New Hampshire) is an important book. It raises the question of whether liberal democracies will continue to determine their own laws and public policies or yield these rights to transnational entities in search of universal order and justice. Essays and opinions that represent both the Left and the Right allow the reader to come to their own opinion.

WINDIER CITY:

AUDIO: Last Night’s Show – Extreme Sovereignty! (Bruno Behrend, 3/30/06, Extreme Wisdom Radio, WKRS 1220 AM)

The Podcast is UP!

NOTE! – after you click the link, the file takes time to download. Keep browsing in another window, and it will start automatically. Turn your volume to about 2/3rds.

Last Night’s show featured an indepth interview with the author/editor of “Redefining Sovereignty” and blogger extraordinaire Orrin Judd.

If you want to get a graduate school level education on Sovereignty, foreign affairs, and international current events combined, buy this book.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S:

Enough with the globo-gab: Transnationalism may be on the way out — and not a moment too soon (MARK STEYN, 3/27/06, Maclean’s)

In Redefining Sovereignty, Orrin C. Judd brings together a splendid collection of essays on the tension between national sovereignty and the new transnational entities. Full disclosure: there’s an approving quote from me on the front of the book, but other than that I have no stake in its success or failure; don’t know Mr. Judd, nor most of his stellar contributors, from Václav Havel and Jesse Helms to Francis Fukuyama and Kofi Annan. The token Canadian is a good choice: David Warren, represented by a fine essay yoking Bush’s approach to Islamism with Lincoln’s to the Civil War — liberating the Middle East is not the point of the exercise, any more than liberating the slaves was. But in both cases it was necessary to fulfill the strategic objectives of saving the Union a century and a half ago, and of saving the nation-state system today. As another contributor, Lee Harris, puts it, “The liberal world system has collapsed internally.” He means that there are no longer, in Kant’s phrase, “maxims of prudence.” That’s to say, we don’t know the limits of behaviour. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we cannot reliably assure ourselves (though many foolish experts do) that this is just a bit of rhetorical red meat, a little playing to the gallery for the Saturday-night jihad crowd.

The transnational gabfests aren’t much use in this new world. The Kyoto treaty is, in that sense, the quintessential expression of the higher multilateralism: the point of Kyoto is not to do anything about “climate change,” but to give the impression of doing something about it, at great expense. If climate change is a pressing issue and if the global economy is responsible — two pretty big “ifs” — then Kyoto expends enormous (diplomatic) energy and (fiscal) resources doing nothing about it: even if those who signed on to it actually complied with it instead of just pretending to, all that would happen is that by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07 degrees — an amount that’s statistically undetectable within annual climate variation.

That’s fine for “climate change,” which, insofar as there is an imminent threat, is a good half-millennium away. As Kofi Annan, the bespoke embodiment of transnationalism’s polite fictions, says, “There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.” Which is swell if your priority is “legitimacy.” That and a dime’ll get you a cup of coffee — unless the tsunami hits and sweeps the lunch counter out to sea. Yet these days, even with natural disasters, the international order divides — like Bagehot’s view of the British constitution — into its “dignified” and “efficient” halves. The efficient humanitarians — the Pentagon and the Royal Australian Navy — have boots on the ground in Indonesia and Sri Lanka within hours, rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. The dignified humanitarians — the UN’s 24/7 permanent humanitarian bureaucracy — are back in New York holding press conferences to announce they’ll be sending a top-level situation-assessment team to the general vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as the USAF emergency team has flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel.

Kofi Annan referred to the UN’s “unique legitimacy,” and he’s right about the “unique” part. The transnational system, in insisting that the foreign minister of Syria is no different from the foreign minister of Denmark, confers a wholly unmerited legitimacy on the planet’s gangster states. In Redefining Sovereignty, Roger Scruton wonders of Saddam “how it is that a petty tyrant could have defied the world for so long.” But, if “the world” is represented by the UN’s “unique legitimacy,” you don’t have to defy it, you just have to strike a deal — in this case, the Oil-for-Food program, that Hydra-headed racket under which, among other fascinating codicils and appendices, a million greenbacks from Saddam got funnelled via his Korean chum Tongsun Park into a Canadian petroleum company run by the son of the quintessential transnational Canadian Maurice Strong — Mister Kyoto himself.

Based on current trends, by mid-century, America, India and China will each be producing roughly 25 per cent of world GDP, with Europe down to 10 per cent. As the columnist John O’Sullivan points out, the three global powerhouses are all strongly attached to traditional notions of national sovereignty, so Europeans and others who’ve bet on transnationalism have the next 10 years to cement its existing institutions and expand its reach.

Hard to cement the world when you can’t even mucilage your own rotten countries together.

GORE EVERY OX:

Changing the rules: a review of Redefining Sovereignty: The Battle for the Moral High Ground in a Changing World By Orrin C. Judd (Steven Martinovich, February 27, 2006, Enter Stage Right)

Liberals aren’t likely the only ones who will argue with the conclusions of many of the essays presented in Redefining Sovereignty. While most are hostile to transnationalism and the erosion of sovereignty, many argue American intervention in the internal affairs of other nations as justified. Judd himself argues that George W. Bush’s mission to reshape the Middle East in a democratic image isn’t at odds with the history of American foreign policy and is indeed necessary to preserve American security. It’s doubtless an argument that will have paleoconservatives and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party less than pleased, arguing as they did against interfering in the Balkans and Iraq because they were sovereign nations dealing with internal issues.

Not surprisingly it’s in between these two camps — the transnationalists and sovereignty absolutists — that Judd pitches his tent. Echoing Ayn Rand when she famously wrote that a state was only legitimate when it protected the rights of its citizens, Judd writes that “Americans have moved on to a paradigm that requires that a regime only be recognized as sovereign if it has democratic legitimacy.” Where previously the test consisted only of international recognition of sovereignty, the new test includes the nature of the state claiming the sovereignty.

Small wonder that new test has generated no small measure of controversy.

It’s at the printer–the new hardcover came last week and looks awfully good–and will be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble & bookstores by the end of March.

I'M JUST A LONELY PILGRIM….:

Redefining Sovereignty. Ed. by Orrin C. Judd. Mar. 2006. 520p. Smith & Kraus, $29.99 (Brendan Driscoll, Feb. 1, 2005, Booklist)

Editor Judd is the more prolific half of brothersjudd.com, a neoconservative blogsite as dedicated to providing up-to-the-minute political commentary as it is to skewering various works of the modern literary canon for being too socialistic (Dreiser), relativistic (Faulkner), or confusing (Joyce). In this book, Judd collects his own canon of opinionated experts on the topic of the future of national sovereignty. Aware that world political structures are evolving away from traditional Westphalian notions of the state, Judd fears “transnationalism,” the possibility that citizens’ rights will be infringed by international bureaucracy and their security achieved at the price of individual liberty. This timely issue will attract many readers. Those seeking robust debate will, however, be disappointed: Though some of this selection’s contributors (such as Kofi Annan) defend the spirit of international cooperation, the majority of the 30 excerpts (including those from Ronald Reagan, Walter Russell Mead, and several National Review commentators) boisterously celebrate American exceptionalism while shouting down isolationism and multilateralism alike. An argument disguised as a debate, this book will likely resonate with Judd’s many internet followers.

Neoconservative? Followers?

MORE:
-PROFILE: Sovereignty Redefined (Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.,
11/03/2005, Tech Central Station)