Dartblog

TigerHawk has a delightful bit on the psychology behind John Kerry’s America-bashing in Davos, Switzerland:

Kerry (like, I speculate, most of the people at Davos this week) is a “transnational progressive”. He and his ilk — they fill the coffee shops in Princeton — recoil against national narratives and identity. Deep down, they think nations are primitive constructs. Not so deeply down, they actually believe that some amorphous international “acceptance” of American policy is more important than the national interest the policy is formulated to protect. Or, more precisely, they believe that American national interest depends on international acceptance, or at least that it ought to. Even this might make sense if it were symmetrical, but transnational progressives do not require the same “acceptance” for incompetent countries.

That’s precisely right. Seconding Kerry’s emotion are men like Peter Spiro, international lawyers who insist that compelling “norms” should put all nations on an even playing field—that power politics is an antique. What is unceasingly curious about these folks is how comfortably they live in this backwards world of patriotism and national interest. And by ‘comfortable,’ I mean they aren’t being slaughtered by ululating Islamists. Precisely two things prevent that: One, the fact of a concrete and particular American interest and Two, the willingness of those simpleton patriots to fight for it.