I’m afraid that in the process of arguing for realism, and arguing against moralizing, non-interventionists are going to go overboard and end up sounding like Hyman Roth (even if that quote isn’t quite exact).

There’s got to be a middle ground between Jonah Goldberg’s handshake metaphor, and saying things like “metaphorical blood is non-transferable.” Do you really believe that? That statement seems to reject the existence of moral complicity, which I don’t believe you do. Diplomacy isn’t complicity, but rewarding, perpetuating, or ignoring any behavior can be. Before you deal with a brutal dictator, you might at least consider whether you’re sufficiently distant from their brutal acts, that you’ve not ignored them and that you will not reward them. And if people everywhere are watching you closely, you might consider declaring your distance, too. What good does that do? Big question. What good does any directed moral statement ever do? Maybe Obama didn’t capitulate to the hawks; maybe he asked himself that question, and answered it, and allowed the answer to be a part of business. So what? That’s to his credit as a human being. You can call Jonah Goldberg’s imagery childish, but you shouldn’t belittle anyone’s concerns about complicity, and I hope that’s not where the discussion is going.

Well, as Buchanan said, isn’t that where the right went wrong? It’s the ideological certainty at the heart of movement conservatism that requires this dichotomous, black vs. white outlook. About as un-Realist as you can get.

It is reasonable, when we talk about what people actually do, to conclude that obedience of a regime is support for a regime, on the individual level — I remember Arendt once said that “politics is not a nursery”. But I think implicit in diplomatic relations between two states is the agreement, at the foundation of the relationship, that neither side comes to the table with the power to compel the other to obey, and that both sides are completely free to do as they choose.

Note also: The US FoPo establishment is habitually concerned that North Korea will take some secondary issue, like reporters it arrested, or Japanese citizens it kidnapped, and try to use them as leverage or bargaining chips to work its angles on the nuclear issue; it continually wants to use non-germain issues to get more nuclear leverage. And now, we find many of these people demanding that we use Iran’s human rights abuses as a bargaining chip in our diplomatic relations with it.