I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts to Catholicize (or Rortyize, or whatever) the culture through proselytization and persuasion. I also said, as I’ve said many times before, that I disagree on both counts: I think that Americans should be free to proselytize privately and that they should feel comfortable using “the levers of politics” (I love how Andrew makes the democratic process sound sinister) to promote policies that spring from religious convictions. And obviously Richard John Neuhaus is interested in doing both; only an idiot would claim otherwise, and I don’t know why Andrew is mistaking me for one. ~Ross Douthat

I am not really qualified to speak about Rorty or the “burning” question (should liberals prefer Rorty or Rawls?) that initially sparked this discussion, but since I have waded into a previous Douthat-Linker exchange I will now offer, unbidden, my probably unwanted comments on this Douthat-Sullivan argument.

I think Ross is probably being too generous here, since I think he might be able to guess why Sullivan is tendentiously attributing the wrong position to him on a question touching on Neuhaus and the intersection of religion and politics.  This has nothing to do with Ross’ earlier statement.  Whenever Neuhaus is mentioned, even in passing, Sullivan’s “theocon” alarm goes off and he begins warning about the heavy yoke of dogmatism.  When someone has spent as much time as Sullivan has in constructing an elaborate web around the myth that “theocons” have helped to turn the Republicans into a “religious party” and a haven for “fundamentalists” (you know, like Bill Kristol), and the central objection he has to “theocons” is that they seek to influence policy (gasp!) according to the lights of their understanding of natural law and revelation (shriek!), no occasion is too small to restate the description of sinister plan {voice quavering with anxiety}: Christians are attempting to…participate in the political process and…direct policies in the direction of their preferences!  Who will save us from this madness? 

A large part of the trouble comes from some of the more slippery definitions that secular critics of the “theocons” use.  We find an example of this in the quote from The Theocons that Ross cites:

The privatization of piety creates social space for every American to worship God as he or she wishes, without state interference. In return for this freedom, believers are expected only to give up the ambition to political rule in the name of their faith – that is, the ambition to bring the whole of social life into conformity with their own inevitably partial and sectarian theological convictions [bold mine-DL].

Two phrases, “political rule in the name of their faith” and “the whole of social life,” do all the work here, but it is never clear what constitutes “political rule” or where privatised piety ends and social life-conforming behaviour begins.  Does political rule here simply refer to established religion, or does it mean any exercise of political influence or power by religious believers?  My impression is that Linker means the latter.  He takes arrangements that most people, religious conservatives included, accept as given (no established religion, religious pluralism and freedom of religion) and then invests this surrender of “ambition to political rule” with a much more restrictive meaning.  Once you have ceded that we should not arrest people for heresy, you must also supposedly cede the right to every other attempt to influence political life.  Once you have yielded an inch on the potentially totalising claims of religion, you are supposed to give up all claims with a social or political dimension.  If you won’t stone the adulteress, don’t bother trying to “impose” your beliefs on anyone with respect to abortion–you threaten the liberal order if you attempt the latter, because it must inevitably lead to full-on theocracy in the end.   

In Linker’s liberalism, how much “social space” do you get?  Is it a bit like zoning regulations, where you can build up to a certain point but cannot come to close to municipal property?  What is worship?  Is it simply liturgy on Sundays and bedtime prayers, or does man’s religious obligations to God and his fellow men require something in addition to that?  Does the bare minimum of religious life require more than that?  Obviously, any remotely traditional religion requires much more.  Linker’s definition of the proper sphere for religion in a liberal order seems to suggest that most of what traditional religion requires simply in terms of religious obligations is incompatible with that order.  If I understand him correctly, it isn’t simply that religion should stay out of the public square, but that the liberalism of the public square should enter into the religious groups of the society and liberalise them as well, if only to ensure that they stay out of the public square. 

God is sovereign over all, and it is the role of Christianity, for example, to be concerned with the whole man and the whole of society, and this for Linker seems to be the major problem.  Any political role is, of course, entirely out of the question, and this would eventually proscribe even proselytising, since proselytism is simply the imposition of the “inevitably partial” and “sectarian” convictions of one religion on adherents of another partial view.  If everyone has his privatised piety sealed off from all attempts to change society, it seems to me that even conversions would be a potential source of trouble, since religious conversions will generate social change.  (Ross says that Linker rejects going this far.)   

In Linker’s privatised piety, if taken to an extreme, Christians would presumably not even live according to the tenets of their faith, because this would be an attempt to bring the whole of their lives, which take place in political society, into conformity with their sectarian convictions.  This could have troubling second and third-order effects, such as “disturbing” patriarchal notions of marriage or veritably “medieval” attitudes towards homosexuality.  It is as if revealed religion were concerned with the whole of life!  It is as if Christianity required men to commit themselves and “all their lives” to Christ God.  Clearly, this is dangerous and subversive stuff–before you know it, they might want to start talking about it in the schools! 

A less extreme form of Linkerian privatised piety would have an allowance for consenting adults to practice their religion, provided that it never went outside the home and did not interfere with the proper, “rational” upbringing of children.  You wouldn’t want to inculcate all sorts of “anti-social” attitudes into your children by teaching them regressive ideas about traditional gender roles or sexual morality.  Christopher Hitchens’ dream of a bureaucrat rescuing children from the “child abuse” of religious education is not far away here.

Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now. ~Rudy Giuliani

Via Yglesias

So apparently he thinks that, whatever happens, the next President will not have to worry about Iraq at all.  

Giuliani seems interested in testing the limits of the generally true proposition that voters choose candidates based on personality and identity politics rather than in actual policy positions.  He seems so convinced of the truth of this proposition that he has decided not to have any policy positions.  It’s a bold (read stupid) move.  Let’s see how that works out for him.

I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever. ~Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s sarcastic remarks here are representative of the tenor and quality of the pro-immigration side of the argument, which is to say condescending and poor.  The quote above is particularly useful as a good example of the favourite pro-immigration tropes, related to the “nation of immigrants” rhetoric: border control is something relatively new and mass immigration of one sort or another has been happening for a long time.  They say this as if these were obviously and always good things.  There may have been times when more lax border control was more acceptable, when there was not a flood of labourers coming into the country each year, and there may have been times when mass immigration helped fuel American productivity when America had vast swathes of undeveloped land and insufficient manpower to make use of much of it.  

Pro-immigration advocates use these tropes as if the policies appropriate to the 1910s, 1810s, 1710s or 1610s were obviously the right policies for the present time.  There is no other area of policy where they would make such an argument (indeed, very few people would make such arguments about any area of policy).  It is surely only in the area of immigration where these proponents of mass immigration take the practices of a lightly populated colonial America, an expanding agrarian frontier society or an industrialising society from the past as prescriptive for the post-industrial present.  For many of these pro-immigration advocates, the religion, politics and prejudices of Americans over these centuries are embarrassing or even despicable, but their de facto approach towards immigration (with the exceptions of the interludes of “nativism”) is all right.  (Indeed, it is because they generally think so poorly of so much of the history of Old America that they want to constantly introduce new populations to continue transforming it away from that Old America.)  In every other way, pro-immigration advocates tend to regard every form of traditionalism, appeal to the past and imitation of past exempla as rigid, stodgy and backwards-looking.  They are wrong about all of these things, but curiously they have no problem dusting off ancient precedents to justify their present obsession. 

It is only on this policy question, the one where they happen to be stunningly wrong and outgunned by numerous social scientific arguments demonstrating the various social and economic problems created by current immigration policy (or lack thereof), that they discover the importance of venerable antiquity and the value of following the example of our ancestors.  Consequently, it is pro-immigration advocates who seem to be constrained by the blinders of myth and ideology.  This myth and ideology tell them that whatever was appropriate to the period of the frontier and continental expansion is also appropriate to our present society, despite its completely changed social and economic foundations.  When confronted with the far greater need for education to be able to flourish in modern society, they chant, not unlike war supporters prior to the invasion of Iraq who invoked WWII and the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan, “We have done it in the past, and we can do it again!”  That might make some sense, except that they show no evidence of knowing how to assimilate these immigrants, just as war supporters have never demonstrated any evidence that they know how to engage in successful democratisation or nation-building or any of the things that they claimed that “we” knew how to do so well.  Additionally, there is the problem that each successive wave changes who “we” are and makes the next period of assimilation less effective than the last.

The centrism of 1992 and 2000 eventually yielded welfare reform, education reform and prescription drugs for millions of seniors. ~Michael Gerson

Via Ross

There is plenty to ridicule in Gerson’s column, ranging from the claims that a federal role in education has something to do with Catholic social thought (subsidiarity alert!) to the idea that disregarding immigration laws is somehow supremely Catholic.  Leave it to the treacly evangelical to tell us what is and isn’t Catholic!  The quote above captures pretty well the chasm that separates Gerson and the “centrists” from both progressives and actual conservatives.  The “centrism” of 1992 and 2000 did yield welfare reform, education “reform” and a prescription drugs entitlement–this is why so many people are angry at “centrists.”  Many of us regard these things as horrible pieces of legislation.  (It seems to me that the latter two really are truly horrible pieces of legislation for which there is no good excuse.)  If they are the defining achievements of “centrism” over the last 11 years, then “centrism” be damned! 

The first was deeply unsatisfying to conservatives who wanted to dismantle or significantly reduce the welfare state, the second has managed to offend conservative constitutionalists and progressives with its centralisation and idiotic enforcement of “accountability” (punishing poor schools for poor performance by depriving them of resources is the obvious way to raise standards!), and the third is a bloated entitlement that is also even more expensive than it had to be, because it has been arranged via a “market” solution (a.k.a., a corporate boondoggle).  Add on the attempted amnesty bill as one more Gersonian type of reform that serious people on both sides of the spectrum regard as simply horrible.  Gersonian “centrism” seems to define itself by embracing the worst of both worlds: run entitlements through the pharmaceuticals, thus committing the errors of expanding government and subordinating the common good to corporate interests at the same time; amnesty 12 million illegal immigrants and create an indentured labour force for big business at the same time; meddle in local control of schools and punish minority school districts at the same time.  This is what “centrists” call compromise, and what the rest of us call a nightmare.  While the “centrists” are doing this, it is imperative that they self-righteously lecture the rest of us on how we lack either moral responsibility or compassion or both if we fail to embrace their hideous expansions of government and corporate power; if we really strongly protest, they are obliged to denounce us as racists and the like. 

If Bushism were actually a coherent political view rather than a collection of payoffs to special interests and constituencies, it would be a political view designed to maximise the worst results from the worst ideas of both sides of the political spectrum.  It would not shock me if both parties and the public wanted to flee from such a thing.  Unfortunately, with the exception of complaints about excessive spending, the GOP field (except for Ron Paul and, on some things, Hunter and Tancredo) is quite happy to carry on with Bushism almost in its entirety.  Despite a lot of rhetoric about their dislike for big spending and endless mentions of the name Reagan, this field does not, aside from the exceptions mentioned above, clearly reject any of the legislation passed over the past six years.  No Republican (except for Ron Paul) is campaigning on undoing what Bush has done at home.  Two of the top three GOP candidates as of right now are the most robustly pro-immigration Republicans in a presidential field since, well, George Bush last ran.  Gerson is denouncing a Republican Party that has, on everything except immigration, basically submitted to Bushism, and whose field of prospective nominees includes no less than four supporters of amnesty (plus Romney, whose views on this have changed considerably). 

If Gerson doesn’t want a GOP of “libertarians” and “nativists,” he is in luck–most of the candidates and a lot of the Republican establishment don’t want a presidential field with Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo.  I happen to like both Paul and Tancredo, but I am sorry to say that they unfortunately only speak for a minority of Republicans (though I suspect Tancredo may speak for as many on immigration as Paul does on foreign policy, perhaps up to a quarter or a third). 

Gerson complains about current political trends leaving some people politically homeless, but Mr. Bush is the one who has evicted far more people from the GOP.  The libertarians, the “nativists” (otherwise known as cultural conservatives and a major part of the core of the Republican vote), the traditional conservatives and the constitutionalists are not welcome in the Bushist GOP, and some of us have known that for a while.  Depressingly, as of right now national polls suggest that the embodiments of the evils of “centrism” (Clinton, Giuliani) are the leaders.  If there is a repudiation of the bad, old “centrism” taking place in this country, I would be very glad to see more evidence of it.

Via Yglesias, I see that someone has dug up an old WWII-era War and Navy Departments’ guide to Iraq.  Reading it is, as the author of the guide might say, a hoot.  Most interesting to me was this section on “differences.”  After listing all of the differences between Americans and Iraqis, the guide continues:

What of it?  You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis.  We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of “live and let live.”  Maybe that sounded like a lot of words to you at home.  Now you have a chance to prove it to yourself and others.  If you can, it’s going to be a better world to live in for all of us.

Official WWII government instruction manuals valorising the idea of “live and let live”?  Imagine that–placing strategic priorities ahead of drippy ideological platitudes!  The neocons will be very unhappy with the freedom-hating bureaucrats at the War and Navy Departments.

Other useful tips to the American soldier fighting Hitlerism in Iraq: “Keep away from mosques”; “Your move is to stay out of religious and political arguments altogether.”  Some advice never goes out of style.

Alex Massie has an interesting item on the non-diplomacy being practiced this year by our Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes.  Apparently, Ms. Hughes doesn’t do much in the way of public diplomacy these days, at least not when it comes to communicating with other countries.  The current year is approximately halfway done and her listed activities abroad so far include a meeting on education in India and an op-ed in The India Times on the same subject.  2005 was a flurry of activity in the Islamic world, but it also brought quite a lot of cutting and hostile commentary from Western media, to say nothing of the impression it probably made on its target audiences. 

As Mr. Massie notes, this change may be for the best.  I do find it reassuring that the government is not sending her around the world too often to patronise Muslim women and talk about how much she, too, loves her children.  That does not stop her from saying annoying things on our own soil: “… like you, we care about our families, many of us care deeply about our faith, we want our children to be educated and have opportunities, we want to live in a secure and a just world.”  Oh, well, in that case, everything is okay. 

However, I would be more reassured if the President himself did not roam the world continuing to chatter on about the great advances of “democracy” in Kyrgyzstan or the historical inevitability of freedom.  It seems to me that each time he gives one of these speeches, as he did in Prague, it is worse than a dozen head-smacking-worthy comments from Ms. Hughes. 

Speaking of which, here is an excerpt from her remarks at the opening ceremony for the Organization of Islamic Conference in D.C.:

Together we must address the misperception fostered by extremists that there is a “clash of the civilizations,” that the West is somehow in conflict with Islam, because I know — and you know — that simply isn’t true. Islam, as a major world religion, is part of the West and an important part of America [bold mine-DL].    

Islam is part of the West?  That will be news to a few people.  Naturally, she gets in the obligatory mention of Rumi, everyone’s favourite Sufi.  More surreal in this context are the invocations of Amazing Grace and Wilberforce’s antislavery reformism and Rosa Parks.

This would be seven successful attempts to win at least a third consecutive term. How many times has one party or the other failed to win a third consecutive term after having won two? Six: 1860, 1920, 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000. It is interesting to note that in three of these five failed attempts – 1960, 1968, and 2000 – only a fraction of the vote separated the two parties. ~Jay Cost

Mr. Cost’s election-counting would be a lot more persuasive if he took the same care with historical analysis that he insists other people take with methodology.  Why didn’t Donatelli include pre-War of Secession elections?  Could it be that the political context before the War was sufficiently different to make meaningful comparisons extremely difficult?  What possible value could be found in making comparisons with the six consecutive terms of Virginia Republicans in the early 19th century?  Is the America of 2007 in any way really politically comparable to America, c. 1807 or 1817?  Why might Donatelli not include war and Reconstruction-era elections?  The answer is obvious: 1860 was an unusually divided election, 1864 was fought under extraordinary domestic wartime conditions and during Reconstruction the game was effectively rigged each time in favour of the forces of occupation, er, the Republican Party.  The one time Tilden should have won, which ended up being the third consecutive GOP term following Grant’s two terms, his victory was taken from him in the “corrupt bargain.”  Properly speaking, the GOP did not actually legitimately win the election of 1876, but kept power as a result of the bargain.  Likewise, 1868 would not have been perceived as an election to a third consecutive Republican term, because most of Lincoln’s second term was served out by his Democratic Vice President.  1872 was obviously an incumbent’s election.  Because of the “corrupt bargain,” 1880 does not really belong to a string of consecutive GOP victories, but represents the break in between the Tilden and Cleveland victories.  FDR was excluded from any comparisons because the advantages of incumbency in 1940 made the contest fairly one-sided.  In other words, FDR’s third consecutive term is not a useful comparison, since no one before or after ever sought to be re-elected a second time.  Hence Donatelli’s qualifications about nonincumbents. 

I grant that Donatelli made a misleading statement when referring to Taft as the winner of a third consecutive term for his party.  It was the fourth consecutive election won by a Republican.  T.R.’s 1904 win is the relevant comparison we should look at, if we want a 2008 comparison, not Taft’s 1908 win.  However, the McKinley-Roosevelt-Taft sequence is highly unusual for at least one reason: most of Roosevelt’s first term was the completion of McKinley’s second, since McKinley was assassinated after his re-election.  Taft was succeeding a President who had been elected in his own right only once, but who had served the better part of two terms.  It might therefore seem at first glance as if Taft was succeeding a President who had won two consecutive elections, when he was actually only succeeding a one-time electoral victor.  The uniqueness of this sequence might tell us something about its poor value for comparison with other periods. 

The best comparison for the relatively unique 2008 cycle is 1928, when the party controlling the White House won the election but did not run an incumbent President or Vice President (where did you go when we needed you, Charles Dawes?*).  1904 and 1988 are poor comparisons for just this reason: the incumbent  President or Vice President was effectively running on a “four more years” platform.  To some degree, any nonincumbent, even if he is from the same party, cannot receive the same credit or blame that accrues to members of the current administration.  Indeed, the main hope that the GOP has is that their eventual nominee runs away from the current administration.  Since that seems unlikely, GOP chances of performing the difficult post-war task of winning a third consecutive term are even worse.  The circumstances in which each election takes place are all important: Hoover’s victory came during a time of peace and prosperity while 2008 will take place in a time of war and general dissatisfaction.  For that matter, 1904 and 1988 were also peacetime elections. 

What we can say with absolute confidence is that no nonincumbent member of an outgoing administration’s party has ever won an election during an ongoing war.  We can say this because the coincidence of an open election during a war that has lasted more than five years has never occurred in the past.  Wartime Presidents usually either win their wars, die in office or choose not to seek re-election.  It has never happened that a President has been re-elected during wartime and the war has continued beyond the end of the second term.  In this respect, there are no clear points of comparison for 2008.  All trends nonetheless point to a repudiation of the party responsible for the war, which is what happened in 1952 and 1968.

*This is a joke.

Meghan O’Rourke didn’t have to do much to convince me that the diamond engagement ring tradition is a sham, since I have come to instinctively, viscerally loathe diamond sellers and their horrible, manipulative marketing.  (Yes, all marketing is manipulative by design, but there has to be a limit somewhere.)  Forget all of the elaborate talk of gender equity–it’s a scam, pure and simple, and the fewer people who are parties to it the better.  It seems to me that buying a diamond ring signals to the woman not so much everlasting devotion as it announces to her and anyone else around, “I am easily conditioned and will do what the people on TV tell me to do.”  Perhaps this is what prospective brides are looking for–how should I know?

After a psychotic, armed with a legally-purchased arsenal, massacred dozens of people on the campus of Virginia Tech University, there was near total silence about the nation’s lax gun laws [bold mine-DL]. ~Francis Wilkinson

I didn’t get into the post-VT massacre gun debate very much at all, but as soon as I read this I realised that Mr. Wilkinson must not have been paying much attention, since there was a very lively debate about this very subject in the days and weeks following the massacre.  The immediate aftermath of the VT massacre was filled with arguments about gun control from the left against arguments mainly about cultural depravity from the right, so much so that the intensity and immediacy of the political spinning of a mass killing were enough to sicken more than a few observers.  Rare indeed was the argument that said, “Yes, lunatics should have access to assault weapons.”  I suppose there were not all that many politicians who made a lot of noise about gun control at the time, but who believes that there was “near total silence” about the laxity of gun laws?

For starters, I’m stunned to see the death of tens of thousands of foreigners caught up in an internecine battle billed by Larison as something suspiciously close to the concern of us Americans. One would have thought that whether or not it was a “bright idea” for Eritrea to secede made as much difference to foreign governments including ours, in terms of judgment, as whether or not Finland were a part of Russia or Slovakia a Sovereign Nation. Wars might always be lamentable, but what business is it of any good paleocon’s to tell Eritreans what and what not’s the smart stopping point for national satisfaction? ~James Poulos

That’s clever, but not clever enough.  The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia wasn’t “internecine,” for starters, but leave that for now.  I never said it was of concern to Americans.  It wasn’t and still isn’t.  I said that it was a very bad outcome for the peoples involved and for the region.  The origin of this very bad outcome was accepted by the “international community” during the flood of national self-determination movements that erupted after the end of the Cold War.  Perhaps nothing could have been done to prevent Eritrean independence anyway, but it serves as a useful example of what can come from the creation of new nations, even when they are created by way of an African “velvet divorce.”  The Horn of Africa is undoubtedly vastly worse-off because of the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict.  I don’t think anyone will debate that.  As a non-interventionist, I think that this does not concern me very much, because that conflict does not touch American interests.  It seems to me that it should concern those who bill themselves as realists and weigh policies according to how they will affect regional and international stability. 

If such observers think Kosovo independence will yield a significantly different result, they need to give reasons why they think so.  Dismissing concerns about the expansion of Albania, a land that is just as riven by criminality as Kosovo, is not a good way to start, when James must know that Albanian insurrectionists already exist in Macedonia in that fine, old Balkan tradition of irredentist guerrillas and they have launched, so far unsuccessfully, rebellions against the government in Skopje.  Macedonia was the killing ground of ethnic nationalists before the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and there is no reason to think that all of the contestants in that old struggle have completely abandoned the old dreams of regaining a territory that at one time or another belonged to their people.  Why else do we have such ridiculous circumlocutions as the name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” except to soothe the bruised Greek nationalist ego?   

Of course, as a non-interventionist I don’t think America should be telling Eritreans anything, but then I don’t think we should be maintaining Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo or supplying Ethiopia with weapons.  There is a whole list of things that Washington does that I think would be better left undone, but since we’re debating the merits of Meddlesome Policy A or Slightly Less Meddlesome Policy B, I choose the latter.  James seems to be of the view that the political future of Kosovo should be of enough concern to us to court the continued displeasure of Russia, among other potential problems, which seems to make Kosovo a matter of sufficiently great concern that he recommends that we expose our relationship with Russia to still greater strains.  To justify this, it is not enough that he simply prove that Kosovo independence would not be a bad precedent encouraging separatist violence in the rest of the region and elsewhere.  I don’t think he has fully answered this concern, which is very much a live concern.  Central and eastern Europe is full of arbitrary post-Versailles and post-Trianon lines that do not match up the ethnic populations of these territories.  If Albanian Kosovo will be independent, why should the Hungarian Vojvodina or Transylvania remain joined to the lands of the victors of WWI?  Once you begin pulling on the threads of the 1945 borders, as we have been doing for the last 16 years, revisionism could keep cropping up all over the place.  Kosovo’s “exceptional” status is just the opposite–there are numerous territories that belong to certain states despite the demographic realities that make them a readier match with other states.  So far, Albania has been the only one chaotic and lawless enough to serve as a launching pad for insurrection, but that does not mean that other states will not eventually provoke similar crises in the territories of their neighbours.  The point is, clearly, that actively promoting the independence of Kosovo will have real consequences for the security and stability of Europe.  If it is none of America’s business, then American officials should have nothing to do with it and the President should not talk about it.  If he insists on talking about it, he ought not say the wrong, destabilising sorts of things. 

In any case, James has to demonstrate that the change is actually an improvement over Kosovo remaining part of Serbia.  It seems to me that he still hasn’t done this.  This isn’t his fault–no one advocating for the independence of Kosovo has made such an argument.  Yet he and other proponents of Kosovo independence are the ones arguing for the innovation.  The burden of proof is squarely on those arguing for the change.  James wants to tell us that Kosovo is some exceptional case whose independence should not be the cause of anyone’s serious concern.  But if it is indeed none of our business whether Kosovo is independent or not, why would we not leave things in thepolitical status quo or even return things to as close to the 1999 status quoante as possible?

James comes to the crux of the matter that ought to matter to the realists among us:

And were Serbia truly isolated — that is, if Russia and China were somehow persuaded that the world, particularly the portions of Asia north of India, would not break out immediately into a contagion of insurrectionist hives — then Europe’s most put-upon state might let this last one go and resign itself to a fate which, admittedly, I would not want were I a Serb.  

This is a vital point.  Serbia isn’t isolated, and even if it were entirely on its own it is hard to imagine that Serbian nationalists would simply take the separation of Kosovo lying down forever.  Kosovo independence all but guarantees Serbian irredentism in the future, and it probably also guarantees Albanian irredentism outside Kosovo.  James says:

The issue is what the US ought to do having put itself in the shoes it now wears.   

Just so.  In our shoes, I think it would be very unwise to encourage the formal recognition of a statelet inside Europe, especially when it was one founded by terrorists and criminals.  Why Washington does not return it to the control of Belgrade remains a mystery.  Why would that be an unacceptable solution?  James has not clearly answered that, unless he is suggesting that I, the paleocon, should be concerned about an intercenine battle inside Serbian territory.