John and I can certainly thank our commenters for vigorous discussion, even if they didn’t seem to find much to like. Let me address some of the comments we have gotten in three separate posts. First is the debate over whether we actually offer a strategy or not. Second is the core debate between ever-shifting versions of isolationism versus internationalism – this time around framed as “give up on promoting values of any kind and simply stick to balance of power politics” versus “pay attention to the actual life conditions of individuals within states around the world and recognize the ways in which their governments treat them can threaten us.” As usual, there are caricatures aplenty floating around in all the comments on this issue, but if we can't have an honest debate here and move on then we can’t get anywhere. Finally, I will address those critiques that charge us with and unrealistic expectations, either in terms of domestic politics (Peter Trubowitz), or international politics (Steve and Dan).

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Although the Administration denies that Iraq is in a civil war, we can be confident that everyone in our government agrees that the United States was embroiled in a civil war from 1861 to 1865. Historians are not of one mind on the butcher's bill, but most would find reasonable a total of Union dead, 360,000; Confederate dead, 260,000. Given the American population of 31 million in 1860, that was about 2% of the population killed by battle or illness contracted during military service. By comparison, the Lancet study sets the number dead due to the current complicated conflicts in Iraq at a little more than 2% of the Iraq population. And, of course, the killing in Iraq continues.

I'm leery of being in the position of defending Hastert, but I'm increasingly convinced that a greater share of the blame for this needs to be put on Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-Turncoat). Given that there were many other sources of information on Foley's antics (eg, Fordham, Trandahl), this does nothing to actually help Hastert out, but in this one case it seems he was underinformed by Alexander and didn't get the information he should have received.

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Effect measure has been on top of the story of the "Tripoli Six". Their story is one which combines a host of the threats and anxieties of our age - the Enlightenment pursuit of Reason, and the Romantic demand for equality are under threat from the forces of absolutism. As a Nature editorial puts it:

Tripoli may seem far away, but knowledge and academic freedom are central planks in many other struggles across the world for more open, democratic societies. Academics and universities are often hotbeds of such reform movements, and every year hundreds of academics worldwide consequently face threats, or worse. It is important that we do not forget them.

Prof. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society calls what is happening judicial murder. The confessions were extracted under torture, because the charges - that the health professionals had deliberately infected children with HIV - were incendiary. It is a sobering reminder of the ticking bomb rationalization's absurdity.

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Allow me to point you to a few articles on North Korea that I wrote this week and that you might find interesting. At The New Republic, I expand on an earlier post here, cautioning against focusing too much on the explosive power of North Korea’s nuclear test. In Slate, I argue that our response to North Korea is bound to influence Iran, and should be crafted with that connection in mind. And (again) at The New Republic, I participate in a symposium on how to respond to the North Korean tests; everyone’s posts there are worth reading, and there’s a good discussion going on in the comments section.

When Bill Clinton commented, “It’s the economy, stupid,” he was doing more than pointing out the nation’s economic woes. He was presenting a philosophy of public policy: Crafting public policy requires much more than a commitment to a particular principle – It requires understanding the reality that people live every day. We need to tailor solutions that fit contemporary conditions. In The Great Risk Shift, Jacob applies this philosophy with great success to (among other things) the risks workers face.

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As coalition uniformed fatalities has reached 3000, and estimates of the death toll to Iraqis pass the half million mark, and may be as high as 750,000 - the political consequences, muted by fear, confusion and complacency are beginning to be felt. In the UK a prominent general says that it is time to declare defeat and go home.

The American uniformed death toll, of 2759, might seem small compared to the 58,209 in Vietnam, but this misses an important effect - namely the effect that medivacing and advanced trauma medicine - some developed to deal with civilian shootings - has saved lives. If those wounded in Iraq died in the same proportion as their counterparts in Vietnam, then the death toll would be 13,083. If the wounded died at the same rate as in World War II, then the death toll now would be 26,738.

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So, we have a new Secretary-General, officially, Ban Ki-Moon, the Foreign Minister of South Korea. And, we also have some snippy remarks from Ambassador Bolton about the end of Annan's term in office:

I would also like to take this opportunity to express, on behalf of the United States, our appreciation to Secretary-General Anna (sic) for his efforts during his years of service to the United Nations. I would also like to express our appreciation for the work of his top team of advisers, who will also be moving on to new challenges.

I am told this remark provoked laughter from Secretariat staff nearby. The thing is, Mister Ambassador, almost all of the "top team of advisers" you refer to were voted into office by the United Nations General Assembly, unlike yourself, who has failed twice now to have your disservice to America approved by this country's Senate.

It's hard to know whether there will be some great massacre of high-level Secretariat staff with Mr. Annan on his way out of Turtle Bay. But, if there isn't, this seems like a tin-eared way to signal the start of your second recess appointment Mister Ambassador. These people will resign or serve at the pleasure of the Secretary-General, not one of the body's 192 Member States.

As I've argued, Democrats need a clearer and more forward-looking economic vision, and that vision should combine a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity. This vision—which I call an “insurance and opportunity society” (but which Jon nicely termed a "security and opportunity society")—is starkly opposed to the ideal of an “ownership society” outlined by conservative critics of the welfare state. The premise of conservative’s ownership society is that we can only be free to pursue the opportunities in our lives if we do not share risks with others. An insurance and opportunity society, by contrast, is based on a very different premise: that we are most capable of fully participating in our economy and our society, most capable of taking risks and looking toward our future, when we have a basic foundation of financial security. In this vision, economic security is not opposed to economic opportunity. It is its cornerstone.

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So the Big Lie of the free trade fundamentalists has been that by getting US corporations into countries like China, no matter how horrific the human rights and labor violations are, those corporations will end up being a politically liberalizing force.  Slowly and surely, those companies will encourage a free society, far better than imposing fair trade rules as a condition for trade.

What's pathetic is that China's leaders on their own, through what appears to be a fascinating internal ideological reassessment, is now pushing to change their laws to give workers more legal protections (although not full labor rights).  It's a small step but it's something.

And the big US corporations are fighting these labor improvements tooth and nail.

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I think I have discovered one of the key differences between liberals and rightwingers. Liberals will not defend every action taken by a fellow liberal but rightwingers (not conservatives, rightwingers) will defend anything their team does.

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I'm going to be writing about what can be done to counter the growing economic insecurity of American families later today. But I just discovered an idea I hadn't thought of -- on p. 18 of today's Times.

Just Asking to Be Caught, Thief Solves Joblessness
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 13, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 12 (AP) — A man who could not find steady work came up with a plan to make it through the next few years until he could collect Social Security: He robbed a bank, handed the money to a guard and waited for the police.

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The nation's exemplary man of virtue was up early yesterday morning to issue this desperate cry:

Okay, look. Now is the time for all good men—and women—to come to the aid of the party.

In 1960, Barry Goldwater famously shouted, "Grow Up Conservatives." It took 20 years for that call to be heeded, and we got the expanded, entrenched Welfare State, a disastrous & humilitaing foreign policy in the meantime; and Ronald Reagan's presidency was about attempting to roll back those 20 years as much as moving forward on a positive agenda.

Look, if you want John Paul Stevens replaced on the Supreme Court with a carbon copy, pro-choice, pro-racial preferences Justice, stay home.

If you want Donald Rumsfeld hauled before Congress every week justifying the war rather than fighting it, stay home.

If you want spending to increase even above the levels you are unhappy with now, stay home.

If you want Henry Waxman holding hearings on every aspect of the administration's actions, stay home.

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Now for the third reason the occupation of Iraq wound up being such a rousing success: The policies enacted by the denizens of the Emerald City.

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I have blogged in the past about the potential connection between the moral impetus of John Edward’s poverty focus and the economic self-interest appeal of a middle class squeeze message as personified by the Democratic Leadership Council’s American Dream Initiative (ADI). In the Great Risk Shift, Jacob provides the basis for making such a link that can serve as the impetus for an attack on poverty that also addresses the heightened economic insecurity faced by working families. Poverty is an increasingly common, short-term destination for more and more families. The recent boom in personal bankruptcies over the past decade should have provided us with ample evidence of this; Jacob’s new book provides further confirmation.

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There are a whole host of reasons progress is slow on a North Korea resolution in the Security Council. Japan is angry. China and Russia are worried about cargo inspections and rising tensions near their borders. And U.S. influence in general...not at an all time high, to say the least. In principle, though, there shouldn't be a problem. Russia says that the DPRK's nuclear test was unacceptable, and China even went as far as to call for "punitive" measures.

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Since its creation in February, Prosper, an online person-to-person loan service, has generated a healthy amount of press (Bankrate, Salon,
Newsweek). Rightly so. Prosper, and similar services expected to debut sometime this year, have the potential to revolutionize consumer lending and reduce the costs of borrowing.

Prosper offers borrowers the chance to save money by avoiding the overhead costs built into loans from traditional lenders. Prosper offers standarized three year loans with interest rates set through a competitive bidding process. Lenders bid for all or part of a loan and Prosper aggregates the funds to make the loan. Lenders then receive a pro rata share of each monthly payment.

With less than a year under its belt, it’s too soon to tell whether online person-to-person lending will grow big enough to provide meaningful competition to other lenders. However, Prosper has recently begun providing data on its loans, which can be viewed here. This feature bears watching, as it provides the number and total dollar amount of loans originated (as of this posting Prosper has originated 3810 loans for a total of $18.2 million).

Vive la Revolution!

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A great Harper's article on Foleygate includes this passage about Rodney Alexander's mishandling of the matter (my emphs):

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Reason Number Two the occupation of Iraq was so troubled? The Emerald City itself. 

There’s no better way for me to make the case than to excerpt part of the first chapter of my new book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City:

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You would sort of expect a movie sexual discovery to advertise itself as being "everything you need to survive the last two years of Bush". However, when even Bob Woodward gets off the bus, then the handwriting is on the wall. Not only don't people approve of the job Bush is doing, they don't like him either.

I know I am writing for a sea of writers and readers who have been composing "15.million.variations.on.I.told.you.so" about Bush mendacity, malfeasance and malice. Which is why the impending sense of fin de l'epoch should be so sweet. Though perhaps it might just be a natural cycle.

Trust me. If it isn't yet. It will be soon. But it has been a long time in coming.

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The litmus test of any grand strategy is its ability to win sustained domestic support. One question I pondered while reading Forging a World of Liberty Under Law is whether it could meet this test – whether the proposed grand strategy’s principles can “transcend partisan lines,” as the report puts it. Unfortunately, the answer is probably not. The problem is not the recommendations per se. On the merits, many strike me as quite sensible. The problem is that in today’s domestic climate, calls for the kind of deep international engagement that Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry have in mind are unlikely to mobilize broad public support. As a result, they are unlikely to win substantial bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill.

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Most Americans – right and left alike – agree that, for some time, Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent, progressive economic vision. Reasonable people might disagree about the substantive merit of the New Deal or the Great Society, but there was never any question that Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson presented voters with clear pictures of how they would steward the American economy.

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Some time ago I was one of many commentators pointing out that the price of oil on the spot market was above what even high demand should produce. The conclusion was that the "speculative premium" was caused by money gambling on commodities rather than investing in stocks. There isn't anything intrinsicly wrong with speculating on markets - I've advised people to do it. However, from the perspective of policy it is a problem, because it means that money is flowing to cushion a supply problem rather than solve a supply problem. One of the few good effects of the Reagan reduction in capital gains was to encourage money to flow out of commodities and into investing in stocks. However, more important was the reduction in excess liquidity pursued by the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

Hindsight confirms what energy bulls like myself were saying - that the price people are paying for commodities has to carry the weight of a world awash with liquidity on its back. It's hard to go upstairs lugging that kind of weight, and it makes plain the economic policy challenge going forward. Either create more investment supply to soak up investment demand, or accept that investment demand is going to continue to drive inflationary pressures, though in more volatile fashion than wage pull would.

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It seems to be something of a buyers market when it comes to American grand strategies -- because an awful lot of people are hawking them. Even as we're debating the relative merits of the Princeton Project's Forging a World of Liberty under Law here at TPM's Book Club, Anne-Marie and John's compatriots at America Abroad are debating Anatol Lieven, who proposes an "ethical realism" solution. Then there's Frank Fukuyama's "realistic Wilsonianism," Robert Wright's "progressive realism," Michael Mandelbaum's case for the American Goliath, and Lord knows how many others. Even the Bush administration felt the need to update its National Security Strategy this year.

In such a crowded market, Forging a World of Liberty under Law (I'll borrow from Stephen Walt's critique and call it FWLL) would appear to have three things going for it:

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Steve Walt has written a tough neo-realist critique of the Princeton Project report, Forging a World of Liberty under Law. His basic thesis is that the report is a liberal internationalist statement that shares “many of the same beliefs” as neo-conservatism – “hubris” in the “energetic use” of American power, urging the United States to intervene in the affairs of others around the world, promoting democracy through force, and generally trying to run the world. “If the neoconservatives are essentially liberals on steroids, then liberal internationalists are just kinder, gentler neocons.”

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Several people have asked me to respond to Dan Senor's op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post about an excerpt from my book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, that was published in The Post on September 17. While I don't want to be drawn into a back-and-forth debate on the pages of The Post or in cyberspace, there are some significant misrepresentations and inaccuracies in his piece that need to be corrected for the record.

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 I am chagrined to note that Jon comes up with a better title for my vision than I do in my book (the phrase I use is "insurance and opportunity" society). But whatever it's called, the basic idea is simple:  Just as businessmen and entrepreneurs are protected against the most severe economic risks they face to encourage economic investment and growth, we are most capable of fully participating in our economy, most capable of taking risks and looking toward our future, when we have a basic foundation of financial security. Economic security is not opposed to economic opportunity; it is its cornerstone. And restoring a measure of economic security in the United States today is the key to transforming the nation’s great wealth and productivity into an engine for broad-based prosperity and opportunity in an ever more uncertain economic world.

 Jon also asks a good question: What are the next steps? For those who are interested, I've laid out one -- universal health care through a new approach that builds on the best elements of our current system -- yesterday in Slate.

But Jon also asks a deeper questions: Do I think that a "security and opportunity" agenda can bring those who believe in it to power?

The answer is yes. And my reason for saying yes will be the subject of my next post.

Indeed, many of the choices that expose Americans to risk -- from going to school to seeking a better job to building a family -- are precisely the ones that most greatly benefit families and society as a whole. Families can give up many of these risks only by giving up on the American Dream.

For me, this passage is the heart of Hacker's political innovation in The Great Risk Shift. It is easy to look at a prescription for society-wide risk spreading and see pure unadulterated socialism. It's much harder to start with social insurance and end up promoting the freedom for individuals to pursue happiness and each create a career, an enterprise or a family of his or her own. And it's harder still to craft the beginnings of a pithy slogan that does a damn good job capturing the idea while remaining correct.

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I've earned the right to say, "I told you so". That is my prefix to this post, which explains why the United States is now in an untenable military situation in Iraq and has no option but a strategic withdrawal and a shift to a covert action program targeted at secular Sunni, Shia, and Kurds.

In November of 2005, I was among the first to warn that the Civil War was well underway in Iraq:

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The NYU historian Tony Judt was invited to speak October 3 on the subject of “The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy” to a discussion group entitled Network 20/20, which always holds its meetings at Manhattan’s Polish Consulate. But Judt received a call from Patricia Harrington, the president of the group, canceling his talk. She told Judt (as he recounted in a widely distributed e-mail) that the Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League, who “warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt.”

Judt said that ADL’s Abraham Foxman warned the Poles that unless they cancelled, to quote Judt’s e-mail, “he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli antisemites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote).” Poland is particularly sensitive about the charge these days, what with the recent publication of Jan Gross’s book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.

Harrington and Foxman did not reply to my attempts to ask them directly about this. But Harrington did tell the New York Sun that the ADL “forced, threatened, and exerted ‘pressure’ on the Polish consulate to cancel the talk.” ADL’s October 5 press release says that “in no way did the League urge or demand that the Polish consulate cancel the October 3 event.”

I e-mailed Foxman to ask what he did say to the Poles, but have not heard back from him.

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Let me start by thanking Elizabeth for having me as a guest on her terrific blog.  I’ve long admired Elizabeth’s work and had the good fortune to share the podium with her several times and to travel up to Cambridge once to speak to her amazing students.  

Recently, in fact, she and I had the chance to be on the right—er, same—side in a discussion about the Democratic Party’s economic agenda and the middle class. In that debate, Elizabeth and I took issue with representatives of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, who argued that Democrats shouldn’t speak forthrightly about the economic problems middle-class Americans are facing because “pessimism” just turns voters off. As we argued, it’s possible, indeed essential, to point out these economic problems—which are real and serious—while still providing an inspiring, optimistic vision for the future.

But Elizabeth and I do agree with the Third Way folks on one point: The Democratic Party has ceded the high ground on the field it once completely dominated—standing up for ordinary Americans on economic policy.

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One thing President Bush deserves credit for. He never exploited 9/11 to foment hate against Muslims or other Arab-Americans.

In fact, after 9/11 he made a special point of including Arab-Americans and Muslims in various events, joined Muslims for religious events and generally did his best to make sure that the average Muslim did not become a target for haters.

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I’m afraid that Rachel Kleinfeld has seriously misunderstood my views – and by the look of things has certainly not read my book. Its principal philosophical and moral inspiration, Reinhold Niebuhr, was anything but a “dessicated Kissingerian realist." He was a progressive, an anti-totalitarian, and as perhaps the greatest theologian that America has ever produced, was concerned throughout his life to place moral considerations at the heart of his realist philosophy of international relations.

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The final report of the Princeton Project on National Security—just released under the title Forging a World of Liberty under Law—is a lot like U.S. foreign policy itself. It is well-intentioned. It is hugely ambitious. It gets some things right, and is couched in a rhetoric designed to maximize its appeal here at home. And like much of American foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats, it is flawed. It takes for granted the universal appeal of America’s liberal ideology, and assumes that most of our problems will vanish once the rest of the world adopts these principles.

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The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll is stunning. The numbers have only gotten worse for the GOP, and the Democrats' have gotten better.

One month until Election Day, and even this pessimist -- who has had his hopes dashed by the Democrats about as many times as they have been dashed by the Phillies -- is getting caught up in the euphoria of a Democratic takeover of, at least, the House.

My boosterism aside, I still stand by my earlier warnings that 2006 is not 1994. For a variety of reasons -- from the lack of a huge number of open seats to the huge number of vulnerable freshmen and the culmination of an once-in-a-lifetime realignment -- I still believe that 1994 was unique. But looking at the Post's numbers, perhaps 2006 may be more like 1982?

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I thought we could pull it off in Iraq. Today, some might suggest I'm defeatist for calling into question our ability to pull it off. Others probably think I'm woefully naive. And yet others must be wondering, "what does pull it off" really mean? Haven't we been moving the goalposts all along?

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What does the North Korean nuclear test have to do with missile defense? According to House Majority Leader John Boehner, quite a bit. The AP reports:

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, accused Democrats of standing in the way of work on a missile defense program. "It is now clear that such a position would weaken America's national defense and put Americans in danger," he said.

This is, quite simply, nonsense.

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In the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, Anne-Marie Slaughter and I argue that the United States faces a kaleidoscopic array of threats in the 21st century – diffuse, shifting, and uncertain. Accordingly, we think it would be a huge strategic mistake to build national security around one threat -- particularly a conflated and ideologically constructed one like Islamo-Fascism. Terrorist networks are a danger but focusing on Islamo-Fascism as the successor to Nazism and communism is a catastrophic failure of imagination – responding to a 21st century threat with a 20th century mindset – and strengthens the hand of those who wish us ill. If our depiction of this country’s 21st century security environment is correct, America needs a grand strategy that can multi-task.

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Having just been brought on as a more permanent member of America Abroad, it's a great pleasure to start by finally have the chance to debate Anatol Lieven.

Lieven's push to move liberals away from our beliefs in building a more just and stable world, and towards a dessicated, Kissingerian realism, has long catlyzed the Truman National Security Project. In his recent post Anatol tries to retake the founders of strong security liberalism, and remove the liberalism from their actions and values. In doing so, he is also moving all of the left away from fighting our real enemy: the current Administration--and towards the in-fighting that weakens the left.

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Ideas matter. In the 2000 campaign candidate George Bush forcefully stated his core ideas: To paraphrase - “We won’t do nation building. It’s a bad idea. We won’t do diplomacy. And especially we won’t deal with evil countries, like North Korea. We will base our foreign policy on a strong military.” Then they acted on their ideas. Again and again. With catastrophic results, as we see in North Korea. Bad idea. So what's next?

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If North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, as it has claimed, does it matter much that the bomb apparently exploded with a power of roughly half a kiloton of TNT, rather than the expected twenty kilotons? I’m frankly amazed at how many folks in the blogosphere (and commenting in the media) have been answering this with an emphatic yes.

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John Hulsman and I decided to write Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World for two reasons. First, of course, we had become completely infuriated by the grotesque and appallingly dangerous blunders of the Bush administration, and exasperated with the failure of the Democratic establishment to put up any effective opposition.

More particularly, though, we were appalled by the way in which the so-called liberal hawks –Peter Beinart and the crowd around the New Republic, Will Marshall and those associated with the Progressive Policy Institute and the “Truman Project” – had misappropriated the names and records of our own philosophical and political heroes: Reinhold Niebuhr and Americans for Democratic Action; George Kennan and the creators of containment; and the Truman administration in general.

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John Ikenberry and I have been directing the Princeton Project on National Security for two and a half years. We set out to "write a collective article" -- to use Princeton's convening power and academic nature to bring together a bipartisan group of almost 400 current and government officials, policy experts, and professors on a wide range of issues. John and I have periodically reported on how the Project was going in our posts on America Abroad, but on September 27th we released the final report, which is available here. What follows below is the executive summary of the first half of the report; the second half offers specific recommendations on a set of policy issues ranging from the implosion of the Middle East to global pandemics, including nuclear proliferation.

Which brings me to today's news. North Korea's actual or claimed test of a nuclear weapon makes the central point of our report more strongly than we ever could.

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On October 6th, the Wall Street Journal cast a spotlight on a new method devised by big drug companies to pick the pocket of middle class families. This time a publishing company had a big impact on the price you pay for prescription drugs, making "awesome" profits for the pharmacies at your expense.

Here’s the scheme: First DataBank publishes prices of drugs in the form of AWP's, supposed to represent the "Average Wholesale Price" charged by drug wholesalers. Pharmacies negotiate how much they will get reimbursed based on the AWP, and often set the out-of-pocket price as a function of AWP (important to consumers without insurance, or those paying for medications not covered by a flat co-pay.) So when the AWP goes up, consumers and health providers pay more. That's what happened in 2002, when First DataBank increased the AWP on more than 400 brand-name drugs. Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit claim that this arbitrarily increased costs for consumers and third-party payors by at least $7 billion over three years. Not exactly chump change.

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While political fallout from scandals at home has hammered Bush at home, the real failure registered on seismic instruments at 0135 GMT with a 4.9 magnitude event which has the signature, not of natuaral techtonic activity, but of an explosion. North Korea claims that they conducted an atomic weapons test. Initial reports had the event lower than expected for such a test, however, the USGS is reporting a figure in line with expectations. While it is possible until the wave has been analyzed that the regime in Pyongyang is bluffing, for the time being, the world is taking the statements at face value.

Beijing issued a sharply worded denunciation, using the word "brazen", traditionally reserved for criminal acts, to describe the test. There is a round of Washington led diplomacy for further sanctions. However, the North Korean nuclear train left the station years ago, even as the United States was boarding the Baghdad Express.

For those of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear war, the the return of the ticking of the atomic clock represents a proof that the post-Cold War moment has been wasted in the wastelands.

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Back in the Spring of 2000, a slightly younger John Bolton, a man we did not need to call Mister Ambassador, who had yet to storm a ballot counting room in Florida, with a mustache I suspect was of a darker hue, declared the following in a law journal article:

A second source of "international law" is the ways in which nations behave, the practices they engage in over the years, a source that evolves and becomes international law. This "state practice" is the basis of what is called "customary international law," which is said to be just as binding on nations n10 as, for example, laws that have passed through the constitutional system of the United States. But this is plainly wrong. Practice is practice, and custom is custom; neither one is law. Customary international law changes under this definition when state practice changes, which led former Attorney General Bill Barr to opine: "Well, as I understand it, what you're saying is the only way to change international law is to break it." n11 This telling remark shows the incoherence of treating "customary international law" as law.

Perversely, with today's news of North Korea's nuclear test, Ambassador Bolton got to prove himself right - America under John Bolton's aggressive foreign policy leadership as UN Ambassador changed the practice of internatio