Author: James Wimberley

It’s the 80th birthday of the Duchess of Normandy, aka Queen Elizabeth II. I’ll spare you the treacly tributes - clear subtext: carry on till you drop to spare us Charles III. The real world has intruded through the unlikely personage of her tasteless, laddish grandson Prince Harry, who has just graduated from Sandhurst (the British West Point). Note this clever headline. Dixit Harry:

There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.

Harry is plainly not bright or self-controlled enough to fake this, and will know the names of Matty Hull, Karl Shearer, and Alexander Tweedie - soldiers of his regiment killed in Iraq. So give him credit for a touch of the right stuff.

Couldn’t happen in a real, manly republic.

What is the mindset that could lead Mearsheimer and Walt to such a strange view of the political struggle? Jacob Levy spots the clue, tucked away in footnote 1 to the less-read academic version of the paper:

Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about.

Read this twice. The national interest to the authors is an objective fact, floating Platonically above the mire of politics. It only needs elucidation by impartial experts in international relations for the ordinary voter or congressman to grasp it. This strange view is I think the professional ideology of diplomats, who quote with approval Lord Palmerston:

Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.

Pam did not, I’m sure, reach this view by burning the midnight oil over Rousseau and Hegel. I think he simply learnt it from observing Canning, Talleyrand and Metternich, who inherited it from their predecessors under the ancien régime, going back to Richelieu, Oxenstierna, de Witt and beyond. For all of these statesmen, the guardian of the national interest was the king, not the people.

My thesis: the theory of the objective national interest is wrong in general, and specifically incompatible with democracy.

Continue reading “Realism II: Palmerston meets St Anselm”

The row over the the notorious paper on the Israel lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt rumbles on in the letters page of the London Review of Books - including a surprisingly temperate piece by Alan Dershowitz, making some amends for this earlier rant. Mearsheimer & Walt will reply in the next issue (4 May).

There’s a good post by Jacob Levy that makes the point that Mearsheimer and Walt have a na�ve idea of American society amd the struggle between interest groups. How can two very bright guys like the authors succeed in brutally competitive top-rank universities, located in in hard-bitten cities like Chicago and Boston, without apparently learning how politics actually works?

Continue reading “Realism meets real life, continued”

Henry Kissinger (still keeping the faith of cynicism) tries to defend the Bush doctrine of preventive war with the “what if Hitler had been stopped” trope:

Had Churchill’s early warning been heeded, the Nazi plague could have been destroyed at relatively little cost. A decade later, tens of millions of dead paid the price for the quest for certainty.

If France and Britain had wanted to fight Hitler before they actually did, they would not have needed any dubious theory of pre-emption or prevention. They only needed to stick by their treaty commitments: just for starters, Article 10 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the 1924 and 1935 Czechoslovak treaties with France. Hitler’s ostentatious scrapping of the armaments restrictions in the Versailles Treaty, the Anschluss, and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 could have been casus belli [mistake in Latin grammar fixed] by themselves. He wasn’t some possible future threat to international security but a serial violator of it, practically from the word go.