Both sides are exactly the same, fascistic despots, each and every one. One world, globalist government, unelected, unaccountable is not in aid of peace, but in neo-slavery. Where there is no rights, no peace, no individual liberty. Where are resources are captured and sold to the highest bidder, as the corrupt, corporate controlled democrats are doing with our drinking water supplies right now. They are stealing water rights away from the individual states, as their corporate paymasters have asked them to do, and place them under the control of the fed, as "products", that can be sold away from us. Not to help the poor in other countries, but to the wealthy Saudi royals, for example, who deny fresh water to their poor, but use it instead to create false, vanity lakes they can sale their sailboats in.

As they will, with the oceans, as the Law of the Seas treaty intends. It will place control of all the oceans and seas on the Earth, under the control of an unelected, unaccountable body, that will sell fishing, drilling and other rights out to whomever pays them the highest bids.

Any so called, "progressives" who support this inanity, is an idiot. They all came together claiming to be against corrupt corporatism, and instead are supporting those who are selling control of everything to the same corporate interests.

Michael Lind,

Thanks for coming.

I think your general talk in this post about what someone "believes in" might be obscuring a very crucial distinction. Some Marxists and other leftists, for example, might believe in a classless global society, but they don't believe that we live in a classless global society. In this case, to say that they "believe in" such a society is to say either that they believe such a society is desirable or that they believe such a society is the more-or-less inevitable future outcome of some process of historical evolution. These leftists might believe that in the envisioned classless society we would act in accordance with, or be bound by, the norms that would prevail in such a society and characterize it. But they don't believe we are bound by those norms now, because they recognize that the envisioned society doesn't exist yet.

As a result, leftists have believed all sorts of frequently conflicting things about how we should conduct ourselves now, and in the long, class warfare-based, revolutionary period preceding the entry into the classless promised land. Such beliefs have sometimes included calls for all sorts of extremely nasty, not-very-socialistic measures.

In the same way, there are some liberal internationalists who "believe in" a rule-governed multilateral order in the sense of believing in the desirability of bringing about such an order, but who don't believe we already live in the desired order. John Ikenberry talks frequently and positively about a "liberal order", and so I guess you could say he believes in the liberal order he describes. But it seems pretty clear that he thinks the relationship of the current global order to the envisioned liberal order is something like the relationship of the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave to the Form of the Good.

So I don’t think the key distinction to make here is between liberal internationalism – belief in a rule-governed, liberal international order – and democratic peace theory. You are right to note that some might believe that the existence of a liberal order requires that the members of such an order be democracies, while others might deny this necessary connection. But the more important distinction, it appears to me, is between those who believe that the actual, existing rules that purportedly govern the international order that actually exists, warts and all, are rules that are binding on us and in accordance with which we should behave, and those who might be drawn to the ideal of a liberal order, but don’t have much respect for the actual rules in the present order.

One of the phenomena that will be worth study by historians seeking to understand the causes of the Iraq War will be what I perceive to have been a dramatic lessening of commitment by liberals, in the decade preceding the war, to existing, actual international law, and to the prevailing international order as represented by the United Nations and its organs. There might have remained a strong liberal faith in the desirability of international law in some reformed liberal order to come. But liberals seemed more and more to have combined that wan faith with a belief that the actual, prevailing order was garbage, and that the norms of the prevailing order were no longer entitled to respect. I can't tell you how many discussions I had back in 2001, 2002 and 2003 with liberals who had no interest whatsoever in the question of whether the impending Iraq War was in accord with international law. To even raise the topic generated smirks and rolling eyes, and smug dismissals of the quaintness of my preoccupatins. One might as well have been talking about the Salique Laws.

What was doubly puzzling to me is that not only did these liberals disdain appeals to prevailing international law, but they were also frequently resistant to calls to rebuild the international order. Surely if they were liberal internationalists, and thought the existing international order was broken, they would want to build a new one that wasn’t broken. But many of these liberals seemed totally captivated by unshakably exceptionalist and nationalist thinking, and treated it as a sine qua non of respectable, patriotic foreign policy thinking that the United States must maintain “primacy” or “leadership” or “hegemony” be the “quarterback” of the world. (Michael Signer actually used that last term.) Their “liberal order” was starting to sound a lot more like a medieval feudal system or natural aristocracy than a system of “united nations” based on the principle of “sovereign equality”, even in the ideal form. I often had the impression that my war-supporting and war-leaning interlocutors were of two kinds: (i) neoconservatives like Kagan who thought international law was for sissies and the weak, and forthrightly admitted their belief, and (ii) phonies who paid lip service to the idea of international law, but were effective Kaganites in their instinct and practice.

In short, liberals in that time seemed to have concluded that international law was a royal pain in the ass that prevented wise, noble and enlightened countries like the United States from rectifying the deficient morals and primitive institutions of the barbarous huns who surrounded us, the latter of whom ignorantly and impertinently affirmed that the same rules applied to us that applied to others, and were simply too inferior to us to be regarded as having any remaining claim on the rusty legal shields erected by decades of international tradition.

Remember also that we had an election five short years ago in which the liberal candidate was forced to do everything possible to walk back his statement about a “global test”, and make it clear that he didn't believe in "permission slips". The belief that we were bound by the norms of the exiting international order, and the large and elaborate body of international humanitarian law and laws of war that already existed, in the here and now rather than in the Wilsonian heaven awaiting us in the next world, was effectively dead outside a relatively small contingent of die-hards.