Reply to Larison

Charles Lindbergh, Call Your Office, New Ledger, April 30, 2010. "Earlier this week, I published a piece [1] in TNL on “Sovereignty and Humanitarian Interventions.” In it, I argued that Prof. Mark Mazower’s “new realism” – as I put it – “comes down to a quest for stability and unenforced ‘legal norms’ at the expense of human rights. It is a call for détente with the world’s dictators, . . . .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." Daniel Larison has taken considerable exception to my thesis in a piece in the American Conservative."