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

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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.

Indonesia back on the world stage (Michael Vatikiotis, 3/30/06, Asia Times)

Welcome to the brave new world of Indonesian foreign policy. The international community has only just started to focus on Indonesia’s successful democratic transition, the economy is only just recovering from nearly a decade of malaise and crisis, and the business community is waiting with genuine expectation for the government’s “war on corruption” to be won. But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is an impatient man - he wants Indonesia to make its mark on the world now.

“We are the fourth-most-populous nation in the world. We are home to the world’s largest Muslim population. We are the world’s third-largest democracy. We are also a country where democracy, Islam and modernity go hand in hand,” Yudhoyono declared last May in his first major foreign-policy speech. “And our heart is always with the developing world, to which we belong. These are the things that define who we are and what we do in the community of nations.”

In fact, what Yudhoyono aims to do is pretty ambitious. Bringing democracy to Myanmar comes high up the list. So, too, does helping Palestinians win their statehood from Israel. Then there is North Korea: the president wants to visit Pyongyang and has already sent an envoy to the hermit state to try to restart stalled security talks between the two Koreas. And if dealing with one end of the “axis of evil” isn’t risky enough, Indonesia has also flagged its intention to help reconcile Iran with the West, exemplified by Wirajuda’s visit to Tehran last month, and thereafter by at least two high-level visits by Iranian officials to Jakarta.

Talk to many Indonesians about Yudhoyono’s foreign-policy objectives and they will argue that the country simply isn’t ready to take on the world. There are too many priorities at home: sorting out the economy, combating corruption, resolving internal conflicts and curbing Islamic militancy, to name just a few. Realists and pragmatists such as former foreign minister Ali Alatas argue that Indonesia is weak and has no clout in the international community. “Who would listen?” Alatas asks, though he recently served as a special envoy to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Fortunately for Yudhoyono, the United States is listening. Indonesia’s democratic and moderate Islamic credentials appeal to Washington, which is also on the lookout for a strategic counterbalance to China in the region.

“Your challenge now is to expand the peace, the opportunity and the freedom that we see in much of Southeast Asia to all of Southeast Asia,” Rice said in a speech to an Indonesian international-relations forum during her mid-March visit to Jakarta. “The United States is eager to work with ASEAN through our new enhanced partnership, and we look to Indonesia … to play a leadership role in Southeast Asia and in the dynamic changing East Asia.”

Indonesia has clout precisely because they’re joining the Axis of Good.

Blair in Indonesia terror accord (BBC, 3/30/06)

Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to work closely in the fight against terrorism with Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population.

Mr Blair was speaking after meeting President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for an hour in the capital, Jakarta. […]

After the meeting between the two heads of state, Mr Blair described Indonesia as a “crucial partner” in ensuring greater understanding of people of different faiths. […]

Mr Blair’s visit is the first by a British prime minister to Indonesia in two decades.

The country, which has a population of about 225 million, has developed close business ties with Britain and the US.

The BBC’s correspondent in Jakarta, Tim Johnston, says Indonesia is increasingly being seen as a vital bridge between Western and Islamic nations.

Judicial activism or restraint? (Walter E. Williams, March 29, 2006, Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

Are federal, state and local justices appointed to office to impose their personal views on society or to interpret law? Is it a judge’s duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and state constitutions in the cases of state and local judges, or is it their duty to uphold foreign law and United Nations treaties? Should what a judge sees as “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights govern court decisions, or the U.S. Constitution?

It was the former – not the U.S. Constitution – that determined last year’s Roper v. Simmons decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the execution of a convicted murderer because he was 17 years old at the time of his offense. […]

Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker has little patience with his colleagues who use their office to impose their values instead of applying the written law, but he’s in trouble for saying so. Judge Parker wrote an opinion article that was published in the Birmingham News on Jan. 1. It criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that banned executions for murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes. […]

Joel Sogol, former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation committee, filed a complaint against Judge Parker with Alabama’s Judicial Inquiry Commission. The complaint charges Parker with violating Alabama’s judicial ethics standards when he publicly criticized his eight Supreme Court colleagues and the Roper v. Simmons U.S. Supreme Court decision. Sogol says that Judge Parker’s criticism breeds contempt for the law.

Sogol has it wrong. It’s the court’s failure to meet its constitutional duties that breeds contempt for the law.

At any rate, we can all agree about the contempt.

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.

Peace isn’t made when real wrongdoing goes ignored (Jonathan Gurwitz, 03/29/2006, San Antonio Express-News)

“The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.”
-Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, writing in the Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2004

A peace laureate acting as an advocate for war might seem odd. Odd, unless you understand that war is not the worst evil known to mankind. And odd, unless you understand that the absence of war is far from being the same thing as peace.

“Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate,” Ramos-Horta wrote. “It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad.”

I recalled Ramos-Horta’s powerful essay while reading the piddling statement from Christian Peacemaker Teams after coalition forces stormed a house on the outskirts of Baghdad and freed three of the organization’s members.

All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to focus on the means, not the end.

Blair cooling on green targets for Kyoto successor (Philip Webster in Auckland, Mark Henderson and Lewis Smith, 3/29/06, Times of London)

TONY BLAIR was accused last night of caving in to American pressure by proposing a watered-down replacement for the Kyoto Protocol that relies on new technology rather than binding greenhouse gas cuts as the solution to climate change.

The Prime Minister will call today for a new international goal of stabilising temperatures and carbon emissions at present levels when the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012, to be achieved primarily by investment in cleaner energy technologies. […]

Mr Blair’s proposal, which comes as the Government admitted that it would miss its pledge to reduce carbon dioxide output by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2010, will be laid out in a speech to a climate change conference in Wellington, the New Zealand capital.

When George Bush co-opted India, China, Japan and Australia it was the end of Kyoto for all but fanatics.

Fukuyama’s Fantasy (Charles Krauthammer, March 28, 2006, Washington Post)

History will judge whether we can succeed in “establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq.” My point then, as now, has never been that success was either inevitable or at hand, only that success was critically important to “change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.”

I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the enterprise: “The undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail.”

For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as “a virtually unqualified success” is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its ensured success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the root causes of Sept. 11: “The cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world — oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.”

Fukuyama’s book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of Sept. 11 — new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of “soft power” — is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire.

Mr. Krauthammer is, of course, wrong about History not being at its End, but, oddly, Mr. Fukuyama takes many of the wrong lessons from history. Most importantly, as Mr. Krauthammer points out, he reverts to exactly the error that Woodrow Wilson made after WWI. Where George W. Bush has taken the democratic self-determination ball and run with it, Mr. Fukuyama proposes instead a shift in focus to the same kind of futile League of Nations folderol that consumed Wilson and turned victory in that war into defeat. A genuinely American foreign policy requires the universal extension of our ideals to peoples not yet free, not the erection of transnational bureaucracies that tie us down.

It should always be rememberd that Wilson had 13 good Points but went down fighting for the awful fourteenth:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.

XII. The turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

[editor’s note: Redefining Sovereignty contains both the Fourteen Points and an essay by Francis Fukuyama]

MORE:
-LECTURE: Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (Charles Krauthammer, February 12, 2004, 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, AEI Annual Dinner)

Fukuyama’s John Kerry moment: a review of America at the Crossroads Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy By Francis Fukuyama (Steven Martinovich, March 27, 2006, Enter Stage Right)

[A]merica at the Crossroads is one of the better arguments against the war and its aftermath, both on philosophical grounds and real-world politics. In it Fukuyama argues that the current strain of neoconservatism, one he no longer considers himself a part of, responsible for the war in Iraq is far different from the one pioneered by the alumnus of the City College of New York in the 1930s and 40s. While the movement’s founding fathers were convinced that American power could be used for good in the world — as World War II proved — today’s neoconservatives have departed from several key principles.

Those principles include an aversion to preemptive wars and recognition that social engineering — which Fukuyama uses as a euphemism for nation building — was extraordinarily difficult. If Saddam Hussein was indeed a danger to global security, Fukuyama argues, then the war was too preemptive considering the failure to actually find the weapons of mass destruction the world was led to believe he possessed. And the post-war difficulty the coalition is experiencing is certainly proof that building a democracy is impossible without the internal demand for liberty and the institutions necessary to sustain it.

If there’s no internal demand then why did the Iraqis adopt a liberal constitution and why do they keep turning out for free elections?

Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says (DON VAN NATTA Jr., 3/27/06, NY Times)

In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.” […]

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as “an insurance policy against the unexpected.”

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, “If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs.”

Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. “The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten,” Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, “But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway.”

Folks have continually underestimated the degree to which the WMD argument and the UN maneuvering were just favors that George Bush did for Tony Blair and Colin Powell and not things he ever cared much about. Indeed, he stunned the Brits by offering to let them not participate in the war if it was going to cause Mr. Blair too much domestic political trouble