Dobie Gillis for Commander-in-Chief

Good men nowadays question what form of government is best and search like Plato for a formula, following which this benighted race of ours may automatically perfect itself. The Delta sages of my youth knew there was no such formula. —William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee

If you missed devil-woman TKB's post on shame-based internationalism, check it out:

Start with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe cracking down on anti-union drug warlords to appease American Democrat Congressmen, skip over to the EU-pleasing election of Boris Tadic in Serbia, Bush's unhelpful lipservice while on a gratuitous Israeli playdate...it becomes quickly apparent that the focus is anywhere but the homeland, where ever that may be.

The rise of the "international community" in the guise of organizations like NATO and the EU has forced diplomacy into stilted, scripted interactions a la Leave It to Beaver.

"Well gosh, Al, those drug lords of yours sure are causing a ruckus... what'll the boys down at the lodge think?..."

"Aw heck, if it means that much to ya I'll tell 'em to quiet down..."

The focus has definitely shifted outward: everyone's busy trimming their lawns and painting their fences, while no one seems to care that the wastebasket in Pop's study hasn't been taken out in two weeks, and the fruit laid out on the kitchen table went bad and has started attracting flies.

. . . shifting domestic politics in a certain direction to make a good impression on the "international community" is certainly nothing new- but what is is that there's no consensus on who needs to be impressed. The US? The EU? NATO? It's not just the would-be westernizers and capitalist culture seekers coming across as sheepish and insecure anymore...

A far cry from Matt Yglesias's reading that the international organizations that popped up in the forties and fifties "created the levels of trust and confidence necessary to allow the governments of Europe to choose peace rather than competition." The UN may have been founded out of zeal for Kantian universalism, but such zeal is neither a condition nor effect of membership in it. Yglesias may or may not be right that international organizations made the global scene look less like a patchwork of exclusively self-interested actors, but is this really the "liberal internationalism" he has in mind, and, if it isn't, would more enthusiasm for organizations like the EU and the UN get us there?

Burke said that "whilst manners remain entire, they will correct the vices of law, and soften it at length to their own temper"; to the extent that it even makes sense to talk about the "manners" of a community the size of a planet, I'm not sure we can hope for much more than the weird gestures TKB describes.