The Case of Zurab Adeishvili

Zurab Adeishvili and the Trouble with Interpol, Contentions, December 16, 2013. "Interpol is in many ways a strange organization. Strange, because most of what people know about it is wrong. For example, it’s not an international police force; it’s more like an international police bulletin board. Strange because, unlike too many international organizations, it exists more for what it does than what it says. And strange because, though like the U.N. it’s numerically dominated by the autocracies, it has escaped being organizationally dominated by them: the secretary general of Interpol has always been French, British, or–as today–American."

Samatha Powers and the Hypocrisy of the Atrocities Prevention Board

Atrocities Prevention Board, One Year Later, Contentions, April 23, 2013. "It’s about as likely that the U.S. will develop the ability to predict atrocities before they happen as it is that we’ll develop the ability to predict events like the Arab Spring before they happen. It’s all too easy to make a list of places where bad things are more likely to happen: any place where government is either really strong or really weak is a contender to head the list. Nor is there any secret about where the world’s atrocities are happening today: Syria, North Korea, Iran, the DRC, and Sudan, among others. The usual suspects. The problem is not that we lack the administrative tools to recognize this. It’s not even that this administration has in practice been more interested in cozying up to Russia, downplaying radical Islamism, and kicking the can down the road in Syria and Iran, though all of that will feature heavily in the work of a future Samantha Power. It’s that these are, in Power’s own words, problems from hell, and you don’t address problems from hell with a nice, well-mannered, invisible inter-agency board."

How the Dictators Hang Together

A Falkland Islands Coda, Contentions, March 21, 2013. "Spurred on by James Kirchick’s superb piece on why the Falkland Islands matter, and by my on-going visit to the UN, it’s worth pointing out how the Falklands illustrate one more thing: how the autocracies, in hanging together at the UN, all too often organize around their shared hatred of Israel."

A Fog of UN Code Words

On the Rhetoric of the United Nations and the United States, Contentions, March 20, 2013. "Sitting in the back of the room as the UN’s member states negotiate the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a disorientating experience. That’s partly because it’s not a negotiation as Americans understand the term: it’s a series of more or less unconnected national interventions on particular points of interest, while the actual drafting happens out of sight. It’s also because Iran and North Korea are treated with at least as much formal respect as the United States and South Korea."

John Stuart Mill, the ATT, and Syria

Multilateralism and the Arms Trade Treaty, Contentions, March 18, 2013. "The negotiation of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which I am observing at the U.N., offers a wonderful environment in which to observe the various species of hypocrisy. But like any zoo, you pretty well know what’s in the cage. Iran will be smoothly menacing, Syria will spit venom, and every developing nation will demand “implementation assistance,” i.e. more foreign aid. In the U.N., the dangers and the silliness are somewhat mitigated by their predictability."

Defining Victory Down

Al-Qaeda in the United States, Contentions, February 27, 2013. "It was also 20 years ago that Senator Daniel Moynihan warned of the dangers of “defining deviancy down.” Today, our strategy against Al-Qaeda is to win by defining victory down, and focusing only on the damage we do to its so-called core. That wrongly elevates drone strikes from a tool into a strategy, ignores the recruiting appeal of the Islamist ideology that is at the heart of the danger posed by Al-Qaeda, and neglects the fact that we are not very good at anticipating how al-Qaeda’s franchises and allies will grow, cooperate, and spread. Last year, very few analysts worried about Islamist militants in the Mahgreb; today, they control half a country."

The Transnationalist Strategy and the First Amendment

Re: WH Asks YouTube to Pull Anti-Islam Video, Contentions, September 19, 2012. "The problem with the White House’s efforts is not just that they are wrong in principle and feeble in practice. It’s not just that it has handed all the agenda-defining power to Islamist radicals, and refused to recognize that the video is an act of political judo against the U.S., and a pretext for violence, not its cause, in the Middle East. It’s not even just that it plays into the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s seemingly-lost campaign for U.N. action against the ‘defamation of religion,’ which the Obama Administration rightly opposed."

Arms Control and the Need for Verification

Missing the Point on Arms Control, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "Over the last several weeks, Rose Gottemoeller, the Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, has given speeches in Stockholm and Helsinki that, while focusing on Europe, set out the Administration’s broader philosophy on arms control and verification. This philosophy is profoundly misguided."

Stolen Valor and the Origin of the 'Crazy Vet'

Re: The ‘Crazed Veteran’, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "The virtue of Stolen Valor is the way that it methodically and systemically uses documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests to reveal fraud after fraud, fake after fake, and lie after lie from supposedly traumatized veterans who in reality rarely even served in the military or saw combat at all."

The EU's Explicitly Elite Approach

The EU’s Pursuit of Stability Über Alles, Contentions, September 12, 2012. "The EU turned from an instrument for restoring a degree of stability to one dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. That approach – and Dalrymple is absolutely right about this – is bound to fail. It means the EU, which still talks a lot about increasing Europe’s power in the world, is more interested in pursuing policies which guarantee Europe’s continued relative decline. It also means that the reality of German dominance of the EU – politics win in the short run, but economics win in the long haul – is becoming ever more obvious to most Europeans, which is one reason why the EU is less popular now than ever."

Did US Arms Sales Really Triple in a Year?

Iran Drives Spike in US Arms Sales, Contentions, August 28, 2012. "The New York Times’ Thom Shanker cites a new Congressional Research Service report to make the startling claim that “weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high” of $66.3 billion, an “extraordinary increase” from 2010’s total of $21.4 billion and one that represents “three-quarters of the global arms market.” The full report, by Richard Grimmett and Paul Kerr, is available here. While the dollar figures that Shanker cites are accurate, the context he provides is not."

The Superstitions of Academic Freedom

Ayn Rand and the Academy, Contentions, August 28, 2012. "The most stifling part of the ivory tower atmosphere is not the way it turns some authors into nonpersons. It’s the tedious artistry inherent in the way smart people write on interesting subjects only to serve the agenda of snipping at conservatives."

Washington Post Credulity on China's Arms Exports

China’s Arms Exports Aren’t Mistakes, Contentions, August 28, 2012. "Colum Lynch had an interesting feature on China’s arms exports to sub-Saharan Africa in the Washington Post this weekend. His premise was that, while China does all it can to prevent this trade from becoming public knowledge, it is conducted without the approval of China’s diplomats. This may in some cases be true: the Chinese Foreign Ministry may not know about China’s exports of incendiary cartridges. But that just sums up the problem, which is that China is not a nation governed by law. Expecting it to have regular, lawful processes is quite beside the point."

Unacceptable Ambivalance on Falklands

Obama’s Private Assurances on Falklands Not Good Enough, Contentions, March 18, 2012. "Until I hear President Obama state, on the record and publicly, that the U.S. sees no reason for negotiations over the Islands because it recognizes British sovereignty over them, I am going to take this brief, private interchange reported at second hand for what it is worth: not very much at all."

Two Terrible Speeches

Why Writes This Stuff?, Contentions, March 15, 2012. "Look – writing welcoming remarks must be a tedious job, and I wouldn’t like to do it for anything. But would it be too much to ask that his speechwriters avoid obvious solecisms? If you’re going to use the tired ‘the British burned the White House’ joke, don’t follow it up, two paragraphs later, with the claim that “through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant – the rock-solid alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom.” So, except for the whole burning thing, it’s a constant?"

The No Good, Very Bad Ike Memorial

Ordered Liberty and Controlled Chaos, Contentions, March 7, 2012. "Gehry’s philosophy of design reminds me of my encounters with deconstructionist theory in graduate school: disorienting, until you realize that the point of the enterprise is not to convey meaning but to smash it, while all the while assuming a pose of ironic, superior, unsmashed detachment in order to win immunity from criticism. Gehry’s leitmotif is that “life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising,” democracy is either chaos or at best “controlled chaos,” and so buildings should be chaotic as well. This is the kind of thing that sounds well until you think about it for five seconds. Modern democracies are in fact the most unchaotic, predictable, secure societies in the history of the world – the only way they look chaotic is next to the Garden of Eden, or the paradise of the planner."

Here's One Thing You Missed: The Cuts Don't Exist

Britain Shows No Sign of Shaking Addiction to Debt, Taxes and Regulations, Contentions, March 7, 2012. "With British Prime Minister David Cameron’s state visit impending next week, we can expect to hear a good deal about – though see nothing very much done about – Afghanistan, the NATO Summit, Libya, and Syria, But we’re also likely to get a smattering of commentary about Britain’s parlous fiscal position. If we’re lucky, the media will talk about “Tory spending cuts.” If we’re really lucky, they’ll call them “savage.” Writ large, it’s useful to remember one thing about these spending cuts: they don’t exist."

A Case Study of Media Error (Or Bias)

Politifact’s Pants on Fire, Contentions, January 20, 2012. "I’ve worked with PolitiFact before, and while I’ve not agreed with previous pieces, they were at least defensible. What it comes down to is that Romney’s claim is factually correct, but assessing the context would require a book-length analysis that would be subject to a wide amount of legitimate dispute over many factors, some of them fundamentally unknowable. Even if applied earnestly and knowledgeably, fact-checking is terrible at assessing this kind of context, precisely because the facts are not known: it’s why Churchill described strategic leadership as an art, not a science. Fact-checkers would have a better sense of their potential contributions and limits if they bore Churchill’s wisdom in mind, and recognized that checking facts is not the same thing as criticizing art."

Reviewing "The Iron Lady"

'Iron Lady' Bias Can't Diminish Thatcher, Contentions, January 18, 2012. "The Iron Lady is not a particularly good movie. In structure and feel, it’s much more a one-woman play than it is a film. But on the screen it’s a success nonetheless, if only because, perhaps without meaning to, it displays conviction politics in their purest, most elemental, and most attractive form."

University Travel and Totalitarians

Blue State Travel to Cuba, Contentions, January 3, 2012. "A friend has forwarded me a solicitation from the University of Michigan’s Alumni Association to join them on a “Cultural Connection” visit to Cuba. It is a depressing piece of moral blindness. For $3,845, Wolverines can enjoy an eight day trip, complete with “a visit to a local health clinic” to “learn about socialized medicine and the delivery of social services in Cuba,” a trip to an art institute to “compare and contrast the role of the arts in Cuba and the United States” and “identify any differences in the opportunities for artistic expression,” and a “substantive discussion” with the management team of a dance company to explore “the political and financial challenges they face” (i.e. the U.S. embargo) in exporting Cuban dance culture. There is a good deal more in the same vein, including a visit to the Museum of the Revolution and dinner at the Restaurante Vieja Havana, “formerly the American Club,” but you get the picture. It would be pleasant if moral blindness was all that was involved here, but sadly, it’s not."