These are strange days for New York City’s finest. Over the weekend, they deployed in force to find the terrorist who tried to bomb Times Square. Yesterday, they deployed in force to protect the terrorist who is president of Iran. One of these guys works in propane, fireworks and gasoline; the other guy in enriched uranium, polonium triggers and ballistic missiles. ~Bret Stephens

This is how Stephens begins his column, which he presumably would like his readers to take seriously. Before getting to his treatment of non-proliferation, I find Stephens’ sloppy use of the word terrorist to be quite telling. On the one hand, there clearly was an attempted terrorist attack averted in New York, which threatened to maim and kill civilians for the purpose of sending some sort of political and/or religious message. Whoever was responsible for the attempted bombing was engaged in terrorism. Ahmadinejad is a demagogic politician with cronies in Iran’s military and security services. By what definition of terrorism can one seriously refer to Ahmadinejad as a terrorist? Of course, the purpose for using this word is not to describe Ahmadinejad when many other derisive labels would work even better, but to identify him and the supposed threat the (non-existent) Iranian bomb could pose with the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. From the start, Stephens’ analysis is propagandistic and misleading.

Stephens continues:

That other guy—the one who didn’t roll into town in a Pathfinder—was in Manhattan to unload on this month’s U.N. review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And unload he did: on the Truman administration, on the Obama administration, on “the Zionist regime,” on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, on the NPT itself. For all this, Iran is still considered a member in good standing of the treaty, entitled to its seat at the International Atomic Energy Agency and its right to the nuclear reactors [bold mine-DL].

This will probably be hard for Stephens to follow, but Iran’s status as a signatory to the NPT doesn’t depend on whether or not its weak president gives an inflammatory, annoying speech somewhere. Until Iran produces nuclear weapons, it will continue to have “its right to the nuclear reactors” guaranteed by the treaty. Fundamentally, Iran hawks don’t like the treaty because it allows Iran to develop and to have some nuclear technology, and the hawks regard Iran’s mere possession of any form of this technology as unacceptable because of what it might lead to at some point in the future.

One of the hurdles Washington has encountered in rounding up international support for a new round of sanctions is the obvious hostility the U.S. and some of our allies have to the Iranians’ possession of any nuclear program. Other developing nations see this hostility as an expression of the one-sided nature of the non-proliferation regime and as an attempt to deny a developing country access to energy that it has every legal right to seek. Many of the world’s emerging-market democracies and even some of our allies do not share our obsession with curtailing Iran’s nuclear program, because they do not believe that it will lead inevitably to a bomb. In the past, much of the rest of the world has been skeptical when Washington has cried wolf about potential international threats, and the rest of the world was right to be skeptical. Why are all these other governments wrong this time?

It is worth noting here that Ahmadinejad recently repeated his government’s formal opposition to the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Obviously, no one takes this at face value, and most of us assume that Iranian officials must be lying whenever they say this. Nonetheless, it could be useful to consider the possibility that what we assume about Iranian intentions is simply wrong. Just as “everyone” agreed that Iraq had WMD programs (even though there were actually quite a few vocal skeptics), practically everyone in the U.S. is quite sure that Iran is working on building a bomb. In almost everything I have written on Iran for the last five years, I have taken this for granted, but as more time passes the claim that Iran is eagerly working toward a bomb and will have a nuclear weapon very soon becomes less and less credible. Everything else in the debate on Iran policy centers around what is a fairly questionable assumption. If it is wrong, we are all making sanctions vs. containment vs. military strike arguments about something that may not be happening at all, and we are throwing away any chance of opening up normal relations with Iran on account of what could be a fantasy.

P.S. Race for Iran has some relevant comments from Mohammed ElBaradei.

The Tories are almost always second, of course, but Massie can’t figure out why. It’s this: People actually prefer to vote for parties that stand for “certain ideas or policy positions” instead of parties that exist only to give politicians day jobs. ~Denis Boyles

Alex Massie can defend his own arguments, but I found this response from Boyles to be quite bizarre. In response to Boyles’ call for yet another Tory defeat (or at least his claim that a Tory victory under Cameron might be the worst outcome possible), Massie had written:

There are two kinds of political party: those with a narrow sectional interest that hope to advance certain ideas or policy positions and those, larger, parties who exist to win elections. The Tories are in the second group.

The distinction Massie is making here is straightforward enough: he is distinguishing between parties that focus on a handful of issues and are organized mostly for issue advocacy and parties that organize a broad-based coalition of interests to win elections. In Boyles’ view, to be one of these latter parties is to have no set ideas or policies of any kind, and he seems to think that these parties will also tend to lose elections (i.e., they will be most unsuccessful at the thing they are designed to do). This doesn’t follow at all, and it doesn’t make any sense. Boyles’ confidence that the electorate will reward interesting and clever thinking is quite touching. Here he is repeating the strange claim that he made earlier that Cameron’s Tories have a lack of vision and imagination. One can argue that what Cameron has proposed is incoherent, or one can say that it is a compromise of some hallowed principle, but one cannot say that there are no specific policies or “certain ideas” on offer. As these things go, the Tories have actually proposed a fairly distinctive and memorable manifesto.

As Ross wrote in his column a few weeks ago:

The Tories’ election manifesto, released early last week, promises “a sweeping redistribution of power” — from London to local institutions, and “from the state to citizens.” In one of the most centralized countries in the Western world, Cameron is championing a dramatic transfer of responsibility — for schools, hospitals, police forces — to local governments and communities. In a nation with a vast and creaking welfare state, he’s urging people to put more faith in voluntarism, charity and the beleaguered two-parent family….His emphasis, again and again, has been on a smaller, leaner, less intrusive government — and in its place, a “big society” that can bear the burden currently shouldered by social workers and bureaucracies.

Nobody would mistake the Cameron Tories for Tea Partiers. By the statist standards of British politics, though, their manifesto’s emphasis on localism and limited government is quite daring. The Tories may sit to the left of American conservatives on a host of issues, but Cameron is offering a more detailed and specific vision of what conservative reform might mean than almost any English-speaking politician since the Reagan-Thatcher era.

Perhaps Boyles objects to decentralization on principle, or perhaps he distrusts the political class to follow through on actually decentralizing power and assumes that the “Big Society” idea is a distraction or some sort of trick, or maybe he thinks it simply won’t work properly. If it is one of the last two, he might have a point, but it is very odd to declare that the relatively most ideas-oriented, innovative Tory election campaign message in a generation is nothing but a hollow plea for government sinecures.

While I’m on the subject, I should say a word or two about Cameron’s “Big Society.” As Massie has noted before, the name is unfortunate, but the idea of local civic institutions and families taking responsibility for more of their own affairs is basically a sound one. One reason why I was not able to take Cameron that seriously for a very long time was my assumption that his re-branding efforts would involve nothing more than co-opting New Labour themes, and over the last few years I have found plenty of things to criticize about Cameron, but what is so surprising about the “Big Society” manifesto is how unlike the centralizing “reform” or “compassionate” conservatism it is. Where Bush was constantly inserting the federal government into the work of charitable institutions, schools and local communities where it had not been before, Cameron is proposing that social institutions take over for an intrusive state. Maybe it will never happen, and maybe the society Cameron wants to entrust with these responsibilities has atrophied so much on account of dependence on state institutions that it will not be up to the task, but as far as the concentration of power is concerned it is nothing like the modernized Toryism I was expecting. It is also nothing like the completely empty pursuit of office for its own sake that Boyles sees.

Greg Scoblete noticed another flaw in Bromund’s critique of Mazower:

What’s missing from Bromund’s litany is the one thing that could potentially improve humanity’s lot – trade policy. Strengthening commercial ties between nations does not guarantee peace, harmony or the flowering of democratic governments. It certainly hasn’t – yet – with China. But it does improve people’s living standards and their material well-being and could, over time, lead to pressures for reform. Better still, strengthening trade does not require Washington bureaucrats and think tankers to anoint political winners and losers in countries whose cultures, customs and internal dynamics they simply do not understand. No need to drop-ship liberal institutions – they can grow, if they can grow, organically.

This is right, and we should emphasize that Bromund’s list of alternative actions in between armed intervention and full acceptance of the status quo includes nothing but punitive measures. Actually, Bromund does refer to trade indirectly when he calls for economic sanctions, but his proposed economic response to abusive governments is typically negative. Whenever a foreign government is doing something outrageous to its own people, we always hear calls for this sort of punitive measure that does nothing for the people being abused and tends to make the state stronger vis-a-vis the people. Economically integrating authoritarian states more fully into a system of international trade is not going to eliminate conflicts of interest between their governments and ours, and it may not lead to political reform for a long time, but we know for certain that cutting these states off from the outside, impoverishing whatever middle class the country may have had, and forcing the population to rely on corrupt officials and black marketeers for goods do not improve matters at all.

The less integrated in the global economy a state is, the easier it is for that state to resist and ignore outside influence, and the more sanctions Western nations impose on a state the greater the incentive for other major and rising powers to fill the void left behind by departing Western investment and businesses. Every time Washington imposes economic and financial sanctions on this or that authoritarian state, it is actively denying the United States added influence and leverage in the future. Many Iran hawks seem to believe that it is Iran we will be isolating and weakening by imposing increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, but ultimately it is U.S. influence that will be weakened and all of the other major and rising powers in the world that will gain. Sanctions will cause difficulties for the Iranian people, but the Iranian state will become stronger and become even more firmly locked into the orbit of other powers, which will make it even harder in the future to bring international pressure to bear. This doesn’t serve American strategic interests, but it also does absolutely nothing for the dissidents who are suffering under the current Iranian government. It is also the inevitable result of punitive policies aimed at isolating other states in futile efforts to compel changes in regime behavior.

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it? ~Michael Barone

Barone says it is “undeniable” that the Democrats today have pursued more “statist” policies than they did twelve years ago, but that is misleading. Twelve years ago, Clinton was in the final years of his second term using the Republican majority as a foil to help boost his own popularity during a period of economic expansion. Going back to 1998 allows Barone to talk about New Democrats and New Labour together, but it necessarily ignores how much more “centrist” this administration has been so far than the first two years of the Clinton administration, to the extent that we can compare the two. The health care legislation passed this year is considerably less statist than the 1993 plan, and it is partly this relatively watered-down quality that has generated so much dissatisfaction on the left. By this point in Clinton’s first term, income tax rates had already been raised. Until the 2001 tax cuts expire, income tax rates will remain lower under Obama than they were during Clinton’s tenure. If we judge by what has been signed into law, unified Democratic government in 2009-10 has been more “centrist” and more successful in passing major legislation than unified Democratic government in 1993-94.

It is also important to distinguish between the fates of Labour and the Democrats. New Labour has been in power uninterruptedly for thirteen years. The Democrats have only been in the majority in Congress for three years, and have had unified control of government for a little more than a year. Brown’s government is responsible or is being held solely responsible for Britain’s fiscal and financial woes, to which Brown contributed as Chancellor under Blair, and Labour cannot pin any of this on its political opponents. Labour could have called and then likely won a general election after Brown assumed the leadership in 2007. Had he done so then, Brown would not be in his current predicament. This is first and foremost evidence of the failure of Brown’s political leadership. What Barone cannot really show is that Labour is suffering politically today because of a lack of “third way” political positioning or a lack of “centrism.” Were Blair still leading his party into another general election this year, there could be no question that the electorate was rejecting a relatively “centrist” Labour government.

What Barone does not address is the depth of disgust in Britain with the political establishment as such and the extent of Labour’s perceived failure as a governing party. Ideology aside, the perception of gross incompetence on the part of a Prime Minister who was supposed to be a technocratic wizard has been killing Labour for years. The rise of the Liberal Democrats as anything like a serious contender in the election receives only passing mention, as if the Lib Dem surge has no meaning for understanding the political preferences of the British electorate.

What is remarkable in Barone’s argument is how he can casually refer to the rise of the left-liberal Liberal Democrats and their possible eclipsing of Labour as the second biggest vote-winners, and then nonetheless proceed with his argument that the “third way” still represents political salvation for parties of the left. In some respects, the Liberal Democrats are not as statist as Labour, especially when it concerns civil liberties, but on the whole they clearly identify and position themselves as more progressive and internationalist, which are hardly defining features of “third way” parties. If the British left were not divided into two right now, would anyone be talking about the possibility of a Cameron ministry beginning later this week? Does Barone really think that the British election is the best advertisement for third-way “centrism” when it will probably result in the humiliation of one of its flagship parties?

Economically populist Democratic candidates fared well in 2006, and even relatively socially conservative Democratic candidates in the South and Midwest campaigned on an agenda of economic populism, and that was before the financial crisis and the recession. One could argue that both parties have harmed themselves significantly to the extent that they pursued “third way” policies that identified them closely with financial interests and neoliberal trade dogma. At least in the U.S., it is the perception of closeness to Wall Street and the belief that the government is doing too much to help financial institutions that have been dragging the majority party down. Arguably one of the smartest things the administration has done in the first two years has been to avoid pushing new free trade agreements that would alienate and dispirit core Democratic constituencies. Obama has not made Clinton’s NAFTA mistake, which was very harmful to Democratic turnout in 1994 and which Barone would naturally regard as one of Clinton’s great triumphs. Had the administration followed the “third way” playbook and pushed for additional free trade agreements, it might have won praise from Barone, but it would probably have doomed many more Democratic House members to defeat.

Missing from Barone’s analysis is any consideration of how the electorates have changed over the past two decades. If the British and American electorates have moved left in the last 16 years, the “third way” has had its moment, achieved whatever it was going to achieve and has since become largely outdated and irrelevant. Democrats and Labour benefited politically for a time from this style of politics, and both parties have to some extent internalized its lessons, but circumstances and electorates are obviously not what they were in the ’90s. An important difference is that Democrats spent most of the last decade adapting to changed circumstances, while Labour was the party in power in Britain that saw no need to do this. Despite Barone’s best efforts to claim that the two parties are headed for similar fates, the Democrats now are where Labour was ten years ago, and the GOP strongly resembles the Conservatives that Blair easily and repeatedly defeated at the polls.

So we’re agreed: ‘realism’ in practice means sidling up diplomatically to dictatorships and giving them (at least) equal standing in the international system (and morally) with democracies. It’s always nice to end an argument by finding some common ground.

The only question is whether this approach is a good thing or a bad thing. I’m happy to stand with the democracies. If Larison wants to run on the human rights and diplomatic records of the likes of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, China, and Sudan, that’s his affair. But it doesn’t strike me as a winning ticket, politically, ethically, or historically. ~Ted Bromund

It is interesting that Mr. Bromund has quoted me several times and has not contested the substance of anything I have said. What is striking about his response is how unresponsive it is. It is a little disappointing that he thinks any of this has to do with “running on” the “human rights and diplomatic records” of various dictatorships. What we have been discussing is the following claim by Mazower:

But the more thoughtful of them [interventionists] have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare.

Bromund’s latest response with its bizarre Lindbergh reference and irrelevant pro-democratic posturing has missed everything that matters. He has still not begun to engage with the truly important part of Mazower’s essay.

Let’s revisit Bromund’s central claim on which he bases everything else in his original argument:

It is simply not possible to separate the internal behavior of a state from its external policies. States that abuse human rights are not states that respect legal norms, and not ones that promote international stability.

In my first post, I spent some time explaining how false his central claim is and how this wrecks his entire critique of Mazower. I won’t repeat all of that, but I will instead point to an example that reminds us how untrue this close identification between abusive internal policies and destabilizing external policies really is. Everyone will agree that India is a democracy and most will agree that India is an important U.S. ally. It is also a country that suffers from many tribal, ideological and separatist conflicts, one of which is the rebellion of the spreading Maoist Naxalite movement mostly in eastern and southern India. PM Singh has identified the movement as a chief threat to Indian national security. Megha Bahree reports on the suffering of the civilian population that has been caught up in the fighting. Here we see many of India’s poor villagers suffering from human rights abuses committed by government forces as the government attempts to suppress a violent political movement that is also fueled by real economic grievances. As Bahree makes clear, this is not limited to inflicting collateral damage in the course of suppressing an armed insurrection, but has become an orchestrated campaign of dispossession waged against poor farmers:

The government has also squared off more frequently against those who have farmed the land for centuries, using various legal entitlements–and, villagers often claim, resorting to fraud or force–to gain possession of the property. Other times the state simply seizes the land, labeling any resistance rebel-inspired. Hundreds of thousands of people have been dispossessed and displaced. Many now live in what could become permanent refugee camps, where they are prey to both sides of the proxy war and easy converts to radicalism.

In my view, this is clearly an internal Indian matter. It is counterproductive to wage a counterinsurgency this way, as it will tend to swell the ranks of the Naxalites and alienate even more of the rural poor population in India, but it is ultimately not our business. A realist approach dictates that we do not define our relationship with India around how it conducts its internal affairs. A preference for democracy has nothing to do with this, as it would apply just as much if India were not a democracy. That doesn’t mean we approve of Indian government tactics, nor do we have to ignore what is happening, but we do not allow one aspect of Indian internal behavior to control U.S. relations with a rising power and valuable ally.

In Bromund’s view, the domestic excesses of the Indian state against its own people cannot possibly be separated from India’s external policies. If we accepted his view, we would have to assume that India does not respect other international legal norms and will therefore be a contributor to international instability. We would have to assume that internal Indian abuses tell us that there will be destabilizing Indian actions abroad in the future. In reality, this is not remotely true. For the last decade and more, India has been an anchor of stability in the region and has refrained from retaliating in response to repeated provocations from Pakistan. So we see again that Bromund’s claim about the connection between internal and external policies is false, and the rest of his argument against respecting state sovereignty collapses.

I could have demonstrated how false this claim is by using authoritarian states as examples, but this allows all of us to perpetuate the idea that respecting state sovereignty and not interfering in other states’ internal affairs on human rights grounds only concern the abuses of dictatorships. One of the virtues of respecting state sovereignty is that it is in the self-interest of both authoritarian and democratic states to defend the principle, and it is consistent with Western values to honor that principle. Out of foolish zeal to advance Western values, interventionists have compromised this principle on several occasions and dishonored those values in the process. If the goal is reducing the likelihood of international conflict and sparing the world from the horrors of war, rather than looking for reasons to start wars and to inflict terrible suffering on whole peoples, undermining state sovereignty takes us in the wrong direction. For some reason, that is the direction Bromund would like to go, but this seems both politically and ethically unwise.

I’m sure all good Tories wish Cameron well. But one could argue that a Cameron win might be the worst of all outcomes for the Tories. Call it the sorrow of granted wishes, but if he wins, the Conservatives will run on visionless, unimaginative, timid platforms for years. ~Denis Boyles

Via Massie

Besides being a bizarre call for a fourth straight national humiliation for the Tories, Boyles’ description of Cameron’s platform is unrecognizable. One can reject most or all of the “Big Society” platform, and one can attack it for being incoherent, but it is almost exactly the opposite of “visionless, unimaginative and timid,” or at least as far from it as one can reasonably expect a major center-right party platform to be in a predominantly center-left country. That would be a far better description for the Tory platforms from 2001 and 2005. Under the circumstances, it might have been safer to attack Labour for mismanagement and failure and avoid any attempt at proposing something new or remarkable at the same time. Indeed, one of the things the Conservative right dislikes about Tory modernizers is that they are forever proposing to re-brand and remake the party’s image and, to a lesser extent, its policies, too. There are certainly many Conservatives who don’t think their party needs to change that much, but quite frankly the Tories have tried it their way, as Massie reminds them, and come no closer to electoral success.

John O’Sullivan compares what he regards as Cameron’s failure with Orban’s recent overwhelming success in Hungary, and insists that the Tories ought to be replicating Fidesz dominance. As Massie notes, not only does this fail to take account of the sorry state the Tories were in after 2005, but it pays no attention to the differences between the political landscape and the electorates, as well as the state of affairs in the two countries. Britain had the Parliamentary expenses scandal, a financial crisis and exploding debt, but Hungary suffered from many of the same things to an even greater degree. Their government is on the verge of bankruptcy and faces even worse economic and fiscal woes than Britain, and Hungarians are among the nations that have most lost confidence in electoral democracy and capitalism in all of central and eastern Europe.

No wonder that the former ruling Socialists fared so poorly in both rounds of voting and Fidesz wracked up a two-thirds majority. Hungary also obviously has no other mainstream party on the left, so disaffected Socialist voters either voted Fidesz or cast protest votes for Jobbik, and Jobbik’s own status as a hard-line nationalist party necessarily limited how successful it could be. No less important, while Fidesz is a major part of the political establishment, it actually acted the part of an opposition party ever since it lost power in 2002. When Medgyessy dragged Hungary into the Iraq war along with the other embarrassingly obedient central and eastern European governments of “new Europe,” Orban and Fidesz were openly against it from the start. Can the Tory leadership say as much? Of course not. Fidesz has represented a credible center-right alternative to the Socialists for many years, but the Tories have only started to seem credible in the last two years, so Fidesz has had quite a head start both in terms of its political strength going into this year’s elections and in terms of the way it is perceived by the public. After all, it is not enough for a ruling party to have disgraced and discredited itself with failures and bad policies (Blair had already done quite enough of that by 2005), but there must be an opposition that is trusted enough to replace them as well.

When it comes to midterm predictions, Republicans and conservatives have increasingly divided into two camps: the realistic-but-confident camp that expects decent Republican gains in both houses expressed by Gerald Seib this morning, and the barking-at-the-moon-crazy camp to which Minority Leader John Boehner and some over-enthusiastic pundits belong. Seib’s article is worth reading to appreciate just how difficult a 40-seat gain is under our current system:

Of the 16 seats Democrats are vacating, four are in such predominantly Democratic districts that they seem likely to stay in the “D” category, even in a tough year for the party. That would leave Republicans with 12 to gain in open seats—provided they hold on to the 19 seats where a Republican incumbent is retiring.

If that happens, Republicans would have to knock off another 29 Democratic incumbents running for re-election. Could that happen? The Cook Political Report, the gold standard in rating congressional races, lists 21 seats held by Democrats seeking re-election that are highly competitive—meaning either that they now lean toward the Republicans or are toss-ups—and another 31 Democratic seats where the race leans toward Democrats but is competitive.

So Republicans would, in short, have to win just over half the seats being defended by vulnerable sitting House Democrats. That’s possible, but still a tall order in an era when House incumbents win re-election more than 90% of the time [bold mine-DL].

That’s why most analysts think the most likely outcome is a Republican pickup of 25 to 35 seats—enough to bring the GOP close to even in the House, but not enough to allow them to take over and replace Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Republican House Speaker [sic] John Boehner.

It is not at all certain that the Republicans can hold the seats left open by Mike Castle and Mark Kirk, and it is unlikely that Cao in Louisiana will be re-elected. That makes the hill the GOP has to climb a little steeper. The vulnerable Democratic incumbents are already reasonably well-funded, which will make it that much harder to dislodge them. While the House races will inevitably be affected by national issues, nationalizing the House elections could backfire in some parts of the country. It is worth considering that Democrats won both of the House special elections in the last year and a half that the GOP tried to nationalize.

There are also vulnerable Democratic freshmen incumbents in some conservative, McCain-backing districts that have strong local appeal that allowed them to win office in the first place. They will not be so easy to defeat. Travis Childers in MS-01 comes to mind. On paper, he is a highly vulnerable Blue Dog incumbent, and his seat is rated as a toss-up or even Republican-leaning depending on the analyst, but he has the advantage of being a well-liked local political leader with especially strong support from voters in and around the eastern part of his district around Tupelo. It was Childers’ appeal as a respected local official that helped him win his own special election early in 2008. Registration in his district continues to be heavily Democratic, the district has traditionally been represented by Democrats except between 1995-2007, and Childers has mostly voted in line with the conservative leanings of his district. According to CQPolitics, there is a strong contender in the Republican primary, but he faces a tough contest before he can face Childers. MS-01 is one of the seats that Republicans absolutely have to win if they have any hope of winning control of the House, and it is far from a sure thing.

Obviously, Boehner’s prediction of gaining “at least 100 seats” is absurd on its face when there aren’t even 100 truly competitive seats this year, but it is important because this is coming from the minority leader and not just from some overzealous activist. Bloggers and pundits can speculate to their hearts’ content, and it probably doesn’t matter at all, but when a top member of party leadership makes such unreasonable predictions he is encouraging complacency for his party. Just as bad, he is inviting scorn for having absolutely no grasp of the political landscape and disdain for having exceedingly poor political judgment. Being hopeful and confident is one thing, but over-hyping your party’s chances like this can only bring ridicule and disappointment. How can the electorate take any of what Republican leaders say seriously when their electoral projections are completely detached from reality?

Ted Bromund critiques the Mark Mazower World Affairs essay I discussed at some length a few weeks ago. He compares new liberal respect for state sovereignty with “detente,” and invokes Reagan and Thatcher to attack Mazower’s argument. This might seem like a clever rhetorical move, but Mazower might easily reply that Reagan was mistaken to oppose detente as completely as he did and Thatcher was at least partly wrong when she said “a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.” Such governments may not be limited by scruples, but it doesn’t follow that they are therefore going to be that much more likely to contribute to international instability and conflict.

Bromund then trots out the usual complaint against respecting state sovereignty:

It is simply not possible to separate the internal behavior of a state from its external policies. States that abuse human rights are not states that respect legal norms, and not ones that promote international stability.

This is a widely-shared conviction that, as far as I can tell, has little evidence in support of it. Abusive and authoritarian governments respect legal norms that they find useful, and a stable international system based on respect for state sovereignty is very useful to them. The world has been full and continues to be full of governments that abuse human rights, and yet very few of them violate other states’ territorial integrity, start wars or kill off foreign nationals on a regular basis in the name of national security. Over the last thirty years, Western democratic governments have done these things at least as often if not more often than authoritarian states around the world.

One could say almost the exact opposite of Bromund’s formulation and be much closer to the truth. That is, states that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

As a matter of international law, state sovereignty has nothing to do with the type of regime or the consent of the people in that state. China has sovereign rights, regardless of what kind of government it has, and the same goes for every other internationally recognized nation-state. Mazower did not err when he acknowledged this reality. If the people in a country desire to change their government and reject the legitimacy of the regime they have, that is another matter entirely, but that is their internal affair.

Of course, it is true that there are policies in between “universal armed intervention and ‘stability.'” On the whole, it is interventionists who want to deny the existence of alternative policies to make military intervention unavoidable. It is interventionists who tend to deride the importance of “soft” power and reject the use of most multilateral institutions. Whatever their opponents are willing to do, they are always urging a more aggressive posture and continually push to escalate things until there is enough political support for the use of force. Mazower’s essay did not rule out possible alternatives. For the most part, Mazower was describing the decline of humanitarian military interventionism on the left. He was not necessarily rejecting any and all advocacy for human rights and political reform in other countries.

I have no idea if Mazower is “unhappy” with universalism. This is a charge universalists on the political right like to make against people on the left to establish their superior claim to Western universalism. The argument usually goes something like this: you decadent relativists believe all values are equal, but we know that ours are universal. Mazower is almost certainly not the particularist I am, and he may not find the claim that Western values are universal to be as far-fetched as I do. However, if he is “unhappy” with universalism I think it must be a universalism that uses the claim of universal values as a license to dictate terms to other nations at gunpoint. What Mazower’s essay showed was that many on the left are coming to realize that their support for universal values does not have to have a militant, crusading element and that there are far more constructive ways to advance human dignity and welfare than launching ruinous wars in the name of human rights and democracy.

Barone’s commentary on Mazower and Mead a few weeks ago was bad enough, but Bromund’s praise for Barone is even harder to take. Bromund writes:

Instead, I prefer Michael Barone’s reaction. In a thoughtful commentary on Mazower, he points out that, since existing international institutions cannot be effective, the U.S. needs to work more closely with its friends and allies. And that leads full circle back to the incoherence at the root of Obama’s vision: if U.S. policy is not based on a preference for democracy over dictatorship, the pursuit of stability will lead the U.S. to cold shoulder its friends and sidle up to its enemies, who can command our actions simply by threatening to disturb the stability that we prize so highly. And that will leave us without stability, law, peace, or human rights.

Readers can judge for themselves how thoughtful Barone was, but most of his argument was based on the misunderstanding that Mazower was emphasizing the importance of international institutions in his essay. As far as I can tell, he was not, so it didn’t contradict his argument at all when Barone noted Mead’s claim that the world was changing in ways that undermined the “authority and efficacy” of international institutions. Indeed, what makes the move away from humanitarian interventionism not only desirable but largely unavoidable is the way that the world is changing. As I said before, other major and rising powers, both authoritarian and democratic, have no interest in a world order in which military interventions are directed against their satellites and clients, and they will become increasingly effective obstacles to future interventions.

These major and rising powers also tend to be in agreement in their resistance to policies that sustain and extend U.S. hegemony, especially as these policies concern Iran. To some extent, the administration has been trying to maintain good relations with these powers, some of which are authoritarian, because we are moving away from a world in which it is easy for U.S.-led “coalitions of the willing” to act in defiance of the rest of the world. This is part of a slow, somewhat grudging recognition of the shifting balance of power in the world. It has nothing to do with a preference for democracy or dictatorship, and there is no substance to the claim that the administration ignores allies and placates foes.

There have been two remarkable episodes this week showing the contempt of two national political classes for their respective electorates and the former’s incredible distance from the concerns of the people they are supposed to serve. By now everyone is quite familiar with Brown’s gaffe referring to a life-long Labour voter as a “bigoted woman” for expressing vague concerns about the influx of eastern European immigrants into Britain. Pretty much everyone in Britain recognizes that Brown made a colossal blunder in saying this on the record, and the assumption is that Brown has likely cost himself huge numbers of votes in next week’s general election.

In fact, all that Brown did was say on the record what much of Britain’s political class thinks of disaffected British voters whose concerns, grievances and objections to the status quo in immigration policy are not addressed or taken seriously by any of the leading parties. That shared disdain leads many voters, many of them traditionally Labour voters, to vent their frustration by electing local councillors from marginal nationalist parties, and this in turn just reinforces the political class’ view that the voters’ objections are motivated mainly by racial resentment. As soon as Brown heard the woman mention immigrants, he probably concluded that he already knew everything about her and her views that he needed to know. He has since had to show contrition because the election is a week away and he has to contain the political damage, but he has already reminded many regular Labour voters what he thinks of them and their concerns.

What is remarkable is how freely Brownian contempt is being heaped on Arizona for its government’s attempt to get some kind of control on illegal immigration after the near-total failure of the federal government for twenty-five years to enforce the law and secure the southern border effectively. For decades, the federal government has failed the border states, and the border states have been left to pick up the tab for an incredibly poor regulated immigration system. In the absence of effective federal enforcement, border states have tried, mostly in vain, to cope with the consequences of mass immigration.

A few years ago, Michael Gerson and his former boss were chief among those proposing the world-of-both-worlds “reform” whose promise of enforcement was not to be trusted, whose guest-worker program was a transparent concession to corporations seeking cheap, exploitable, unprotected labor, and which would have made fools of anyone who went to the trouble to enter the country legally with its “Z visa.” Since that effort was derailed by significant popular resistance from across the political spectrum, Congress has so far not gone near the issue again because it is clear that the prevailing views in Congress are at odds with the views of much of the country.

Byron York has quoted the statute’s language to make clear what the law requires:

For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…

So Gerson believes it is “dreadful” that law enforcement officers would run a check on the immigration status of someone already stopped for some other reason. York goes on to make clear that there would be no check on immigration status if the person has a valid driver’s license:

The law clearly says that if someone produces a valid Arizona driver’s license, or other state-issued identification, they are presumed to be here legally.

Unless there is another undesirable provision that critics of the law have failed to mention, it would seem that the only people who have reason to complain about this law are those who are here illegally and those who believe that immigration laws should simply not be enforced. This is one reason why Gerson’s objections ring so hollow: he insists that he favors enforcement of the law, but objects vehemently the moment someone attempts to enforce the law.

Crist will reportedly run as an independent in the Florida Senate race, and he will make the announcement tomorrow. This is unfortunate for Floridians, who seemed to have a chance to be spared from the continuation of Crist’s candidacy had he followed through on the many public statements in which he explicitly rejected an independent run. Before any silly establishment pundits attempt to anoint him as the Nick Clegg of Pinellas County or as some sort of martyr to the glorious cause of “centrism,” what needs to be emphasized is how unusually unreliable and self-serving Crist is as a politician. As a March Salon article on Crist summed it up:

A series of interviews with Florida political observers and GOP insiders tells a different story — one in which Crist’s problems have less to do with his purported moderation than with an ardor for political expediency and opportunism.

“I don’t know whether Charlie is left-of-center or right-of-center,” says Brett Doster, an unaligned GOP strategist in the state. “Charlie is all about Charlie.”

No one has to agree with or even like Marco Rubio to appreciate the one service he has done for Florida, which is to expose how Crist’s desire for personal advancement trumps any and all other considerations. Whatever their reasons for the Republican rank-and-file’s rejection of Crist, there are few candidates more deserving of rejection than Crist because of the sheer opportunism that has marked his career and which he will continue to display this year.

This is significantly different from the somewhat surprising rebellion that threatens to deny Bob Bennett re-nomination in Utah. Republican leaders and activists decided that the stimulus was going to be a litmus test issue, and Crist failed the test. Compared with the admiration heaped on the far more liberal Scott Brown, the conservative activist loathing for Crist has always seemed fairly arbitrary, but even so this political episode is no more evidence of the “closing of the conservative mind” than Lieberman’s primary loss in 2006 represented some unreasonable extremism from the left. Both are cases of horrible, opportunistic politicians who desperately want to be in political office and have no respect for the views of their core constituents. Their respective parties legitimately rejected them and preferred a challenger candidate instead.

The difference between Connecticut in 2006 and Florida now is that there is a serious Democratic contender in the Florida race, so it is not likely that the state’s Democratic voters will be rallying around Crist to deny Rubio the win. It is possible that he will do enough to split the vote with Rubio that Meek ekes out a victory, or Crist might be able to win a three-way race, but either way his political ambitions will never go beyond the Senate now. If he prevents the new Republican folk hero Rubio from winning, he will probably be more hated on the right than Lieberman ever was on the left, and if he delivers a safe Republican seat to the Democrats he can probably forget about running for office in Florida again. Even if Crist pulls off a win this year, his pattern of looking for the next big political job will come to a screeching halt.