Whither Pakistan

Larison and Bose both make points that will by now be familiar to readers of this little compendium of mental-ward graffiti. One of the most curious pseudo-ideas lurking in the corridors of consensus thinking on "foreign policy" is this notion of legitimacy: whether or not this or that state has a "legitimate" right, duty, obligation, case, cause, what have you to do such-and-such in, around, for, or against some other state. But legitimacy in the political realm derives from compacts, and for all our species faddish love of "universal" declarations of this and that, there are no universal principles dictating what state actors can and cannot "legitimately" do except their actual capacities to do it. The shifting, entirely relative norms of national behavior don't derive from some codified or traditional collection of powers. The legitimacy of America's expeditionary interest in Everywhere, for instance, derives (or derived, at least) from our actual and perceived expeditionary power.

The failure to perceive our own meddling in the affairs of others as helping to foment commensurable actions in other regional and international powers is an obvious historic blind spot made worse by our brief and largely imaginary so-called unipolar moment. Our self-congratulatory self-perception as the sole survivor of the doctrinal, ideological wars of the twentieth century convinced us in quite certain terms that we need not merely make the world safe for democracy, but that, having already done so successfully, we could now make it democracy. Democracy in this formulation referred in general to no particular political system, although we did have a hard-on for Elections; instead, it meant quiescence and clientism. Anyway, we were thus, what is the word, emboldened. Insofar as we believed the American system to have triumphed globally, it made a sort of perverted sense to claim the uniform right to intervene everywhere, since the whole globe was really just an extension of the domestic political economy. The current regime doesn't appear to have any more or less reservations in this regard.