The European Union Constitution, now gussied up as the Lisbon Treaty, is a remarkable document. Napoleon famously remarked that constitutions should be short and obscure. On that count, the Constitution scores one out of two: it is not short, but it is definitely obscure. What Napoleon curiously failed to appreciate was that length, if carried on for long enough, has an obscurity all its own. At 246 pages in its original form, and a svelte 248 pages as the Lisbon Treaty, the Constitution achieves a comprehensive triumph over comprehensibility.

That is one reason why the Constitution, when the EU has deigned to consult Europeans about its acceptability, has had such a hard road. Never was a fundamental redesign and expansion of an institution that directly affects the lives of tens of millions carried out with such palpable lack of enthusiasm on the part of the citizenry. The Constitution did manage to win referenda in 2005 in Spain and Luxembourg. But, famously, it lost crucial votes in France and Holland. That sent the Constitution back to the drawing board, to emerge as the Lisbon Treaty.

The lesson the EU learned from the French and Dutch rejections, however, was not that the Constitution was fundamentally unwelcome, and that it was time to reduce the EU to proportions that were acceptable to the populations of Europe. It was that referendums were dangerous and best avoided. Thus, the Treaty was adopted through a process that required only a single popular national vote, in Ireland, even though then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and seven other nations, had pledged to hold a referendum on the Constitution.

In the end, the French ‘no’ that necessitated the Treaty served the interests of the EU very nicely: by claiming that the Treaty was only a revision of previous EU treaties, instead of a Constitution that created a fundamentally different institution, its supporters could justify abandoning their pledges. And, since the Treaty allows for further changes without resort to national ratification procedures, the EU is close to ensuring that the French and Dutch embarrassments will never recur. If the people want to vote no, the answer is simple: don’t let them vote.

The exception, of course, was the Irish vote, Ireland being required by a 1987 decision of the Irish Supreme Court to hold a referendum. The supposedly shocking result on June 12, 2008 was another no, by 53% to 47%. Quite why this result was so surprising is hard to say. True, the polls had predicted a safe yes, and true, the political establishment was united behind the Treaty. But that was the fundamental problem with the Treaty in the first place: the establishment liked it, and made it quite clear to the voters that it was designed to cut them out of the process.

Most infamous – and most delightful – was the observation of Irish EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy before the Irish vote that he himself hadn’t read the Treaty, and, furthermore, that no sane person would want to read it. McCreevy’s honesty undoubtedly played a part in the Treaty’s defeat – and led to the exposure of the fact that Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen had not read the Treaty either – but his admission was only different in that it was more attention-grabbing than a score of similar comments from EU officials.

There was Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the lead author of the original Constitution, who observed that “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” Or Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht, who said that, “The aim of the Constitutional treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable. . . . It is a success.” Napoleon would be proud.

Before the first vote, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had warned Ireland that “there is no plan B.” That, of course, was untrue: the plan, as always in the EU, was to have the Irish vote until they got it right. In light of the persistence of the EU, Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s statement that the second Irish vote would be “final,” and that there could be no third vote, is as hilarious as it is revealing. What additional illegitimacy could possibly mar a third vote?

The polls say it’s all over. The latest poll, by the Irish Times on September 25, puts the ‘yes’ vote on 48% and the no’s on 33%. That’s not as bad for the no vote as it seems: last time round, the nay-sayers were behind by almost two to one and ended up pulling it out. And Charlie McCreevy has intervened in the process again, this time with the admission that “all of the [political leaders] know quite well that if the similar question was put to their electorate by a referendum the answer in 95 per cent of the countries would probably have been ‘No’ as well.” As Tony Barber of the Financial Times has observed, the obvious implication of this statement is that “EU leaders are forcing the Lisbon treaty into law against the will of the overwhelming majority of the EU’s 27 countries.” And that is no more than the truth.

The interesting question is why the polls show the yes vote in the lead. The quick, often-given answer is that Ireland’s economic circumstances have changed dramatically in the sixteen months since the last referendum. Then, Ireland was the Celtic Tiger. Now, the IMF projects that by 2010, Ireland’s GDP will have fallen by 14%, one of the biggest declines in the industrialized world.

That is indeed an answer, but it is not a very satisfactory one, for the simple reason that integrating more fully into the EU is no answer to a financial crisis. There is a clear and obvious gain in having duty-free access to the European market, but Ireland has that already, and even if Ireland left the Union entirely and took up European Economic Area membership, it would retain that privilege. By signing on to Lisbon, Ireland only guarantees that it will bear its full share of the costs of the EU. And those costs are substantial – so substantial, indeed, that as Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance (UK) has pointed out, “no Government has yet demonstrated in a fully detailed assessment that the EU is of overall benefit to its members.”

The economic argument, therefore, is no argument at all. But it is nonetheless true that the financial crisis has been very good for the EU. I confess that I did not think it would be: twelve months ago, I thought it would likely be the end of the Euro. But the fact is that the EU exists, ultimately, for a very simple reason, the same reason that brought the original EEC into being: to make history go away. The EU is not about doing things: it is about preserving the socialist, bureaucratic, and fundamentally Franco-German dominated status quo.

The more the world changes, the faster the EU has to run to stay in place, which is why it has grown apace institutionally since the end of the Cold War. The financial crisis was another change, and the EU exists to try to prevent change. Its response to changes – see, for instance, its reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer – will always be to try to minimize them by blaming the victim, by doing as little as possible of substance by way of a response, and by integrating into an even tighter defense crouch. Or, to put it another way, while the EU exists to promote stasis, the EU paradoxically benefits from an occasional modest crisis, because crises create fear among the public and provide a built-in excuse for the EU to expand. The EU thrives on the public’s anxiety.

And that is why the Treaty is now ahead in the Irish polls. Sixteen months ago, the Irish people, by a narrow margin, felt more confident of their national destiny inside the EU as it was than in the EU as the Treaty promised to make it. But as Irish confidence has waned, the public perception has grown that Ireland had better accept its fate and dissolve itself more fully into the European future. It’s not much, but at least it offers the veneer of safety.

This is the same logic that made Britain a late applicant to the EEC, and the same logic that has kept it reluctantly inside since 1975: the decline of the British Empire, and the narrative of British decline, created a crisis of national confidence that made Europe seem first acceptable and then dully inevitable. And it is the same logic that brought Eastern Europe into the EU: no part of Europe has greater cause to want to escape from history.

The only weakness in the EU’s case is that it seeks stasis, and this is impossible. The Lisbon Treaty is one more step – a long one – on the road to the extinction of national, sovereign democracy in Europe. Underlying the argument for the European Union is the fear that the rise of democracy and nationalism in Europe caused the world wars that lost Europe its world leadership. That is why the EU has never been about democracy: democracy, being a dynamic and changeful force, is the problem the EU seeks to solve, not the solution it seeks to advance.

But never before has the EU been able to look forward to a future free of any direct consultation with the peoples of Europe. Today, that seems to the EU like a tremendous success. In the short run, for Brussels, it is. But as McCreevy has admitted, the Treaty is being foisted on a public that is basically opposed to the entire affair. The EU is ahead in the polls – at the cost of abandoning any pretense to speak for the peoples of Europe. And now that there will be no more referenda, there is nothing at all to keep the EU even marginally honest.

The EU wants the ability to govern without the fundamental restraints essential to democratic government. Nothing looks more stable than a bureaucratic empire. But restraints on government, as Napoleon found to his cost, exist for a reason: sooner or later, government without restraint stumbles into a crisis beyond its power to master. And when that clarifying moment arrives, the obscurity of the EU’s new 248 page constitution will be no defense against reality. Today, the Irish people are a problem for the EU to overcome. But tomorrow, the EU will find that their obstinacy, their refusal to simply let it have its way, was the best service they could offer it.

Dr. Ted R. Bromund is the Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in the Heritage Foundation.

Daniel Hannan is in trouble. The young Tory European MP, who became a YouTube sensation earlier this year for his denunciation of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the “devalued prime minister of a devalued government,” has made what can in politics be a serious error: he has challenged orthodoxy in a way that is both substantive and interesting. Boring substantive challenges can be seen off, and soaring rhetoric that says nothing is the stuff of politics, but having a point and knowing how to make it will always raise bellows from the defenders of the gored sacred cow.

The curious thing in this instance is who is doing the bellowing. Hannan has achieved the impossible: he’s brought Gordon Brown’s backers and the Conservative Party into harmony. Health Secretary Andy Burnham described Hannan as “unpatriotic”: it’s curious how dissent is only the highest form of patriotism when it comes from the left. Lord Peter Mandelson, the First Secretary of State, claimed that the British people would find Hannan’s remarks “shocking.” If so, they must have very short memories or very low standards: Mandelson, known as the “Prince of Darkness,” has been forced out of the government twice in the past eleven years on ethics charges. For his part, David Cameron, the Leader of the Conservative Party, described Hannan as an eccentric, and the Leader of the Conservative group in the European Parliament, Timothy Kirkhope told the BBC that Hannan should be disciplined for his comments.

Hannan’s error was to step boldly and simultaneously into two ongoing battles, with the result that he was hit by the cross-fire. The battle in the U.S., to which Hannan thought he was contributing, is the one over health care. Hannan is a vehement opponent of Britain’s National Health Service – which he describes as a “60-year failure” that he “wouldn’t wish on anybody” – and a supporter of U.S.-style health savings accounts. As the NHS is the single-payer system to end all single-payer systems, and as it is one of the two foreign health care systems that Americans have heard of – the other being Canada’s – its deficiencies are potent fodder for opponents of what President Obama is pleased to call health care ‘reform’ in the U.S.

The other battle is the one in Britain between the Tories and Labour. There, both parties are competing for the title of who can praise the NHS the loudest. Brown’s claim is strong: he has increased spending on health care since 1999/00 by over 50% in real terms. The results, charitably, have been modest: much of the increased spending has been swallowed up by cost pressures and the advancing bureaucratic legions inside the system. Britain’s Office of National Statistics has found that productivity across government as a whole slumped as more money was spent: as the NHS got an outsized budget boost, it turned in a particularly dismal performance. Labour’s error was to believe its own propaganda that the NHS was suffering from heartless Tory budget cuts, and that the solution was more money combined with more top-down control. The latter absorbed the former, and by the end of his tenure in Downing Street, Tony Blair was returning to Tory-style reforms in an effort to contain the exploding costs.

It’s those costs, and the lingering potency of the claim that the Tories want to destroy the NHS, that gave the Conservatives both their political opportunity and their political strategy. After the Conservatives lost the 2005 election under the leadership of Michael Howard, Cameron concluded that the Tories had to return to the legacy of One Nation Conservatism that exemplified the career of Harold Macmillan and, in his post-war tenure, Winston Churchill. The essence of One Nation Conservatism, at least after 1945, was its unwillingness to fundamentally challenge to the post-war domestic status quo established by Labour.

In the end, that was what destroyed it. The post-war world was not forever, and many policies that seemed correct – or at least sustainable – in the two decades after 1945 had become dangerous irrelevancies by 1979. Appropriately, Macmillan ended his career as a bitter critic of Margaret Thatcher’s denationalizations, as if the tattered and ineptly run industries the British government clung to were really the valuable family heirlooms of his imagination.

The new One Nation vision substitutes New Labour for the Labour Party of the post-1945 era. The problem is that, so far, it has not addressed the actual deficiencies in New Labour’s agenda, just as post-war conservatism proved unable to take Labour’s program and make it work. The problem with the nationalized industries, for example, was simply that they were expected to provide more public services – in particular, jobs for union members – than their steadily shrinking productivity could justify. The NHS faced the same dilemma from the very beginning: the British public then, like a substantial part of the American public today, wanted to consume more health than it was willing to pay for. The NHS was launched in 1948 by proposals which estimated it would cost 145 million pounds per year. By the end of the first eight months, the NHS’s annual cost was 295 million pounds. By mid-1950, experts were anticipating that the bill for 1950-1 would be 426 million pounds.

From the start, the NHS was thus pulled terribly and constantly in two directions at once: it had destroyed the variegated system of charities and insurance schemes that the continent’s post-war systems, by contrast, sought to supplement, so it had to pay for everything. But somehow it had to constrain costs too. In 1951, the creator of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, resigned from his position as Minister of Labour when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, introduced prescription charges for glasses and dental care. According to Bevan, this violated the essence of the system, which was that it was free: “A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” Or, as he put it in his speech to the Labour Party in 1943, the welfare state was “a social experiment” that would allow Britain to “assert a moral leadership which will have consequences in every sphere of her activities.”

Of course, the service was not genuinely free: nothing of value is. Free, in this context, was just a synonym for a grant from the Exchequer paid out of general taxation. But for Bevan, using the power of the state to tax money away from the men and women who had earned it had a morality that actually earning money in the first place could never possess. The crucial consideration to him was that, once the NHS was in place, the old shame inherent in accepting public handouts would be abolished, because everyone – bared from the hedonistic pleasure inherent in writing a check to the doctor – would now be a client of the state.

But Bevan’s belief that free service at the point of delivery was a matter not so much of bodily health but of moral purity exercised a continuing and malevolent influence. By turning the NHS into something resembling a religion for milk and water Marxists – which is not an unfair description of Bevan’s political sensibilities – and by crushing the old system beneath the iron but faltering wheels of progress, Bevan at once committed Britain to a single payer system and made criticizing it a form of political heresy. All Gordon Brown did was to take advantage of what appeared to be one of the most prosperous periods in modern British history to remedy the deficiency that had vexed Bevan: the system could never get enough money.

As it turned out, it still can’t: even as Brown blew the doors of the Treasury to pump money into the NHS, private spending on health care in Britain – there is some, in spite of the existence of the NHS – has remained steady at 1.4% of GDP. No amount of public spending appears to be sufficient to meet all needs, or to satiate the public’s demand for better health, a lesson that the U.S. might take usefully to heart. The idea that instituting a British-style system in the U.S. will save money relies on the premise that Americans could be restrained from spending their own money on their own health, and would be willing to accept British levels of government-provided care. Any politician who really believes this is welcome to test the validity of their belief at the ballot box.

Indeed, Britain spends less on health than the U.S. precisely because, like any basically single payer system, the NHS ultimately has to ration what it provides to take account of the public’s unwillingness to pay higher taxes, a reality that accounts for many of the NHS’s failures and horror stories. The NHS’s defenders have the difficult job of protecting it from the reality that Britain is no longer dominated by the old cloth-cap class system that made it so appealing in 1948: the NHS is a top-down system trying to get by in a bottom-up age. But that has not prevented British politicians on all sides from promising to try even harder and attacking the littleness of their opponents’ vision. That is why Brown delights in Hannan’s remarks, which give him the opportunity to demand that even meeting with foreign critics of the NHS be ruled out of bounds by all parties, and to play the old ‘Tory spending cuts’ card. This blissfully ignores the reality that his own Treasury has forecast massive spending cuts after he wins the next election – however unlikely that eventuality now appears – which implies that even a future Labour Prime Minister would have to continue the ceaseless struggle to reduce the cost pressures in the NHS.

The Conservatives, for their part, worry that Hannan’s words will hurt them politically because, as part of their effort to compete with Brown, they have promised to ring-fence the NHS’s budget when they win. This creates a tricky dilemma, because in 2007/8 spending on health (at 92.2 billion pounds) was almost 30% of the budget. It will not be easy to come close to balancing the budget – never mind achieving the surplus that Brown used to aspire to in good times – after declaring a third of spending off limits. The Conservatives are following the strategy that Blair pioneered in the mid-1990s: seize the opportunity of the recession to talk about the budget cuts that the government plans to inflict, emphasize the danger to public services, look askance at tax increases, and remain vague about how that circle can be squared. The difference is that Blair benefited from sound Tory stewardship of the economy before 1997: Cameron is not going to be so lucky. He has achieved a virtual political miracle in bringing the Tory Party back from the brink: now he will need to follow that up with a fiscal hole in one.

What does all this have to do with the health of ordinary Britons and Americans? Not much. Life expectancies in Britain keep on rising, just as they did before Brown’s spending spree. The majority of uninsured Americans, whose numbers are usually exaggerated, have either decided that health insurance is a waste of their money, or rely on free emergency room care. The former strikes me, personally, as insane, and the latter is undeniably inefficient, but the supposed money-saving alternative of preventive care usually leads, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office testified last week, to higher, not lower, spending. By moving the U.S. towards a single-payer system under the guise of the public option, Obama is heading in the direction of the British system, at precisely the moment when that system, after an unprecedented injection of taxpayer money, has failed to deliver the promised results.

But then the left’s demand for the single-payer system in the U.S. is not about health. It is, as it was for Bevan in 1948, about a vision of social morality, which accounts for the eagerness with which its supporters stigmatize their opponents as unpatriotic and evil. That’s a curious basis, even an unhealthy one, on which to build a health care system, which one might suppose should be judged on its results. But it’s an even unhealthier basis for a political system. There is no surer guarantee of fossilization, and eventual irrelevancy, than mistaking particular policies, which need to change, for immutable principles, which need not. If the British people cannot grasp the difference, Dan Hannan will be the least of their troubles.

Dr. Ted R. Bromund is the Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in the Heritage Foundation. This article is published under his own name.

I keep, mentally, a short list of revelatory works. These are not simply great books. They are books that, because they contain or refute a world view, reveal (or, at least, revealed to me) a new way of thinking about large subjects. The list does not contain any of the obvious works: anyone who is not influenced by Thucydides, Gibbon, Burke, or Smith is simply not very smart, and classics like these are included on any list of worthwhile reads by right.

My list fluctuates slightly towards its tail, depending on the times and my concerns. Lower down in the list are B.G. Burkett’s Stolen Valor, which will demolish everything you think you know about Vietnam; Correlli Barnett’s Collapse of British Power, a remarkably angry work of cultural history and imperial strategy; Christopher Andrew’s Sword and the Shield, the story of the KGB and of the greatest intelligence coup of the Cold War; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a conservative epic of grand strategy.

At the top of the list sits, securely, David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. The Civil War, even more than the Revolution, is America’s Illiad and Odyssey, and its historians are among American’s finest – Catton, MacPherson, and Guelzo, to name only three of many. But Potter’s work is the greatest of all. Completed after his death by Don E. Fehrenbacher – a superb historian in his own right – Potter’s greatness rests partly in his command of his era, partly in the way that all his facts drive his narrative, and partly in the grace of his prose.

But, first, it rests in his irony of his title. For what Potter does is to write a history of the coming of the Civil War from the perspective of a generation who did not know it was coming. Slavery mattered to them, of course, but so did a great many other things – the Mexican War, Irish immigration, the Know Nothings, Manifest Destiny, tariffs, and religion. Potter’s genius is to show how all of these things – many of these only tangentially connected to the Civil War, formally considered – were pulled into the maw of the coming conflict, and in the end brought it closer.

Lincoln appears, of course, but so do many other now less-remembered statesmen, all treated not quite with sympathy, but with deep understanding: Calhoun, Webster, Clay, and Douglas. Potter’s appreciation for rhetoric is profound, and his summaries of the character and appeal of these great men often rises to the level of aphorism. And he does not simply practice rhetoric: his extended appreciations of the great speeches of the day, in an era when speeches were of formidable length and intellectual quality, leaves me in awe of them, and of him.

A truly great work about the Civil War is, by itself, a work for the ages. But Potter rises to the level of revelation because this is not, simply, a work of history. Potter was more than a historian of the Civil War – his challenge to the Turner thesis, contained in his short People of Plenty, shows him as a historian of nations. And at heart, Impending Crisis is a work of political philosophy, of nation-building (and nation-breaking), and of international politics. It shows the Civil War as not just an American epic, but as one great instance of an enduring problem.

Potter’s argument, presented most fully in his chapter on “The Nature of Southern Separatism,” is that multiple loyalties – to town, to region, to religion, to state, to nation – are not a symptom of schizophrenia. Rather, they are commonplace. If they are all aligned, if they are congruent, if it is possible to maintain all of them at the same time, then their multiplicity poses no problem, and they can even be mutually reinforcing. But when events push one loyalty unavoidably out of alignment with the other – as happened in the approach to the Civil War – the conflict between loyalties becomes real, and intolerable. The job of the historian is to explain how and why loyalties that used to cohere came to conflict.

That is a task that Potter performs better than any other historian of the approach of the Civil War. But his understanding of the nature of loyalties, the political conflicts created when they come to conflict, and the need for statecraft that prevents them from doing so, is applicable to problems in politics and international affairs that have nothing to do with the Civil War. Potter was no conservative, but he advances a vision that might be called Burkian in its emphasis on the dangers of careless change and its appreciation of the value of multiple loyalties cemented by tradition. Read his work for its story, for its language, and to better understand the United States. But like all great works, it is about far more than it is about.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

The Group of Eight summit that closes on Friday is being hosted by Italy in L’Aquila. The summit was to have been held in La Maddalena, on Sardinia, but the venue was shifted after an earthquake hit L’Aquila in April as a “show of solidarity” with the victims. The move sums up the politics of gesture that these all too frequent summits embody. This one comes only two months after the G-20 meeting in London, and two months before the next G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, which will be the third such assembly in a year. One summit is an adventure; two are routine. After that, it’s publicity by hyperactivity, and activity as a substitute for achievement.

The wonderfully scattershot agenda of the Italian session betrays the grandstanding, and the tedium, that now characterizes these gatherings. The Italians assert that the G-8 need to become “more representative and more efficient,” as though there is no contradiction involved in inviting China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Egypt to the party and enhancing efficiency. A “new global governance” structure is needed to “bring the institutions closer to the people,” as though such a structure – merely by virtue of being global – could be anything but further removed from the people. Climate change must be stopped, but at the same time producers and consumers need to coordinate a stabilization of energy prices, as though the signals sent by changing market prices are not the most efficient way to move the world’s economy off carbon-based fuels.

There is a nod towards the need to oppose “food protectionism,” from which Italy benefits – by way of the Common Agricultural Policy – to the tune of over $6 billion per year. African development is yet another priority, though it is not a cause that will be advanced by the EU’s January decision to resume agricultural export subsidies. And, while Italy dreamed that the summit might engage Iran into responsibility in Afghanistan, the Iranians refused even to attend a preliminary meeting of foreign ministers. As a result, a summit led by Italy, Iran’s biggest trading partner in the EU, and including Germany and Russia, two of Iran’s most important economic and military enablers, will do nothing more than pretend to be serious about the Iranian nuclear program.

This is all hypocrisy. But it is not only hypocrisy. It is an expression of the inevitable gap between what big, active governments promise, and what they can deliver. Much modern statecraft consists of denying that governing involves making any meaningful choices. We can protect agribusiness in Europe and promote development in Africa. We can make our dime – or our Euro – from Iranian oil, and still convince Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons. We can create a global regulatory structure that will be more democratic and more efficient than the cooperation of sovereign nation-states. We can create a nationalized health care system that will cost less, cover everyone, and provide better care. We can nationalize major car companies and run them without corruption, more efficiently, and more effectively in every way than the private sector. We can have it all, without pain, and anyone who denies this is motivated by ignorance, or, more likely, ill-will. In its denial of tradeoffs, this is simply childish.

One of the advantages of limited government is that the choices it has to make are, by definition, limited. Once government gets big and active, it cannot do everything it promises – not simply because big government is inefficient, or because experts do not know it all, or because the world is complex, or because bureaucracies have motives of their own, though all this is true. It cannot do it all because no one can do it all. Incommensurability is not just a philosophical problem: it is a reality of government.

The gap between promise and achievement can only by bridged, for a time, by rhetoric, and by the appearance of ever-more relentless activity, by summit succeeding summit, and promise succeeding promise. Eventually, reality intrudes: the activity, at best, only slows, but people pay steadily diminishing attention to it, even as the volume at which the promises are made increases. Activist governments end up producing one commodity in abundance: cynicism. What a contrast to the liberals of the nineteenth century, who placed their hopes on the advance of popular education, and in informed public participation in politics. Even socialists like Clement Attlee did not aspire to promote alienation – though, in Britain, it was Attlee’s state that made the fateful move into activism.

Every Western government today is made in Attlee’s model. The differences between them are important, but – compared with what came before the rise of big government – they are also only a matter of timing and degree, as are the results of cynicism they breed. Those results depend, in part, on the political culture the cynicism has left in its wake, and, in part, on just how activist the state has been. Right now, all the facts call out for restraint on public spending: as the IMF noted in its recent assessment of “The State of Public Finances: Outlook and Medium-Term Policies After the 2008 Crisis,” governments need to ensure that stimulus packages consist of temporary measures that do not raise deficits permanently, and to pursue a growth strategy by broadening the tax base and lowering tax rates. Public finances are exhausted, the entitlements crisis – which the IMF describes as the “major threat to long-term fiscal solvency” – is getting worse, and loose fiscal and monetary policies are fueling inflationary expectations. But much of the psychology leans the other way. Blame for the financial crisis having been pined, ridiculously, on the ‘Anglo-Saxon model,’ there is the sense that the model’s emphasis on state restraint must now go by the boards. Above all, perhaps, there is the left’s argument that the crisis is an opportunity that is too valuable to miss, a chance to bring about a permanent increase in state activism that the political culture, or public cynicism, would reject in more settled times.

In Europe, the results of that cynicism were clearly visible in June’s European elections: the center-right parties won on the day, but the real victor was apathy. And that makes sense. The Continent has had the longest exposure to the stereotypical free-spending activist European state, and to the expert-driven, undemocratic model of the EU. Its disenchantment with the establishment is accordingly the most severe.

Indeed, to an extent Americans do not appreciate, this disenchantment was manifest long before the elections, as state after state – to no avail – voted against further EU integration, and as the share of the economy consumed by the state stabilized and even began to decline. The lack of enthusiasm that France and Germany have displayed for stimulus spending as a response to the financial crisis hardly makes them conservative: as Bruce Bawer points out, “many on both the right and the left, while acknowledging the need for welfare-state reorganization, have ultimately resisted it—as if the philosophical leap required were simply too great.” But it does, at least, place them on the downward slope of the spending curve. On the other hand, the crisis has offered the continent’s leaders a chance to play their favorite game: transferring responsibilities to supranational authorities, which, because they are undemocratic, can pursue an activist agenda unencumbered by any need to consult with actual voters. In the long run, restraint on spending will count for very little against this erosion of democratic sovereignty.

The U.S., for its part, looks to be at the start of another cycle of the sort that began in the 1930s. Contrary to popular myth, the Hoover Presidency (like that of George W. Bush) was an interventionist one. Hoover, after all, made his fame as a great Progressive administrator. The next government – Roosevelt then, Obama now – doubled down, in the erroneous belief that they were starting, instead of following, the trend.

From the European perspective, the difference between Roosevelt and Obama is that Roosevelt started off as an economic nationalist, whereas Obama shifts uncertainly between supporting free trade, backing a variety of protectionist measures (such as the “Buy American” provisions in the Stimulus Act), endorsing a European-style global financial regulator, and proclaiming the benefits of a free market. His reluctance to accept the European transnationalist agenda, and the rapidly-waning support for Obama’s economic agenda among independent voters is a reminder that, even if the GOP’s credentials as a party of fiscal restraint and limited government were badly damaged in the Bush years, a substantial part of the country still accepts those aims as the right ones. They lack a party and a creditable leader, not beliefs.

But for now, the U.S., unlike Europe, is moving up the spending curve, becoming more European in its reliance on activist government. The U.S. is not, naturally, a cynical country. Normally, American optimism is associated with individualism, and thus with state restraint. But when coupled with the ‘do something’ excuse of a crisis, the American can-do spirit – in the 1930s and today – becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of liberal activists. That will ultimately bring about a reaction, when the inherent inability of activism to deliver all it promises becomes manifest. In the interim, though, the U.S., in ways we are still too slow to appreciate, will become an even high-spending, activist-government kind of place: for a time, the gap between reality and fantasy will be bridged by the creation of even more florid fantasies about governmental omni-competence.

And then there is Britain. If the U.S. is closing the gap between itself and Europe, Britain has already closed it. Britain has reached the peak of the spending curve: Americans, again, have been slow to appreciate the fact that New Labour has turned Britain into a continental state. As Roger Bate has emphasized, both public and private borrowing in Britain have spun out of control. The OECD’s most recent report on Britain’s public finances was savage, concluding that national debt will rise to 90% of GDP – this year’s budget deficit will by itself amount to 14% of GDP – and that cutting government expenditure will be “the main task of policymakers for years to come.”

The government is so frightened that it cancelled a planned comprehensive spending review, concluding that such a review would only reveal what everyone already knows: its twelve years in power, which began with the most favorable domestic and world economic situation in decades, have produced only a debt explosion and steadily declining efficiency in the public sector. For its part, the Economist referred to Gordon Brown’s April budget as “a dishonest piece of pre-election politicking,” and now spends its time considering “the thin line between bending the truth and lying outright” and posing the unanswerable question of whether politicians actually believe what they say when it has lost all creditability. It chose to illustrate that question with a picture of Pinocchio. Now that is the cynicism born of the activist state.

The sad thing is that, as bad as Britain’s finances are, they are in some respects the good side of the picture. If the will is there, Parliament, in theory, can always stop spending money. But that is the rub. Over the past decade, Parliament has lost much of its ability to make law in Britain. Authority has been moved down, into thousands of quangos – quasi non-governments organizations – and up, into the European Union, both essentially immune to Parliamentary scrutiny. The Parliamentary expenses scandal that has rocked Britain for the past several months is both a sign of and a contributor to an ongoing collapse in belief in government and the political class, aided and abetted by the government of the day and MPs of all parties. The 1960s had many malign consequences, but among the worst was the way it combined activism with a corrosive, left-wing skepticism about public service. As the fading of the Brown government reveals, the two are now inseparably linked: far too many voters now accept – bolstered by a good deal of evidence – that while politicians talk a good game, they are simply in it for the money.

Britain is now well into the second generation of this problem, which, in essence, is the problem of the slow collapse of Victorian standards of governing and behaving. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Gladstone doing as this government has done, impossible to imagine the Commons tolerating it, and impossible to imagine voters accepting it. When given a chance, they are now most unlikely to do so: there is no chance that a referendum on the Euro would deliver a positive verdict, and Labour’s catastrophic performance in the June elections suggests that, in Britain as on the continent, the financial crisis is likely to lead to a Conservative victory, and to a measure of financial retrenchment. What is less clear is whether that victory will staunch the slow bleeding of support away from all the major parties, bleeding born of impatience with the establishment that led to the rise of UKIP, the (over-hyped) BNP, the nationalist parties and – as on the continent – the triumph of the stay at home voter.

And, as on the continent, the EU is at the center of the British problem. Cutting spending is no cure for the problems inherent in the activist state if that activism is simply transferred up to an untouchable European Commission. As the now-famous Tory Euro MP Dan Hannan rightly notes, the EU is ultimately an expression of national pessimism, of a cynical lack of faith in the right and the duty of self-government. As such, once it gets rolling – and it is certainly rolling now – it is dangerously self-sustaining: it disempowers voters, and governments, which leaves the EU free to impose itself even more freely, and for its supporters to do the utmost to pull down any remaining opposition to Europeanism.

Ireland’s pending and EU-enforced revote on the Lisbon Treaty, which it has already rejected once, is one sign of this. The fact that Lord Peter Mandelson –the most powerful man in the British government today – went out of his way the week after the June elections to assert that Britain will “obviously” join the Euro is another. Come what may, today’s liberals are going to do their best not to allow the cynicism their activism breeds to become an obstacle for their policies. Having helped to drive Britain’s economy into the ditch, Mandelson is eager not to learn from experience by adopting more sensible policies, but to throw the keys out the window so that no future government will be able to drive anywhere else.

On Thursday, the second day of the G-8 Summit, President Obama emerged to announce what he described as “important strides forward” to addressing climate change, “one of the defining challenges of our time.” For the first time, he said, developing nations had recognized that they too had an obligation to “take strong and prompt action.” Therefore, they “agreed to take action to meaningfully lower their emissions relative to business as usual in the midterm, in the next decade or so.” To assist them in achieving this impossibly vague goal – since every nation will be able to argue that any given level of emissions is a reduction against “business as usual” – they will receive “significant financial assistance” from the richer states, certainly including the U.S.

Thus, for the sake of a cause about which there is significant scientific uncertainty, on a timetable of over thirty years, in pursuit of a goal that cannot be defined, the President has agreed to transfer large sums of money away from Americans to the corrupt, pollution-intensive dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China. An ambitious aim, to be sure, and the President was well aware that it might give rise to doubts. It was, he said, therefore vital when considering his plan to “fight the temptation towards cynicism.”

One wonders where that temptation towards cynicism comes from.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

It is really not necessary to come up with elaborate explanations for why Gordon Brown’s Labour Party did so badly in the local and European elections in Britain last week. In a democracy, sooner or later every government loses. The scale of the loss is usually proportionate to the amount of time the government have been in office, and the scale of the grievances that have built up during their tenure.

Labour has been in power since 1997, and they have made a lot of people very unhappy. Their leader was Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years. If any single man was centrally responsible for the British economy, it was Gordon Brown. It is hardly fair to blame the global financial crisis on Brown, but it is not at all unfair for voters to notice that Britain has been particularly hard hit by the crisis and to blame Brown for the resulting collapse. Nor is it unfair for voters to believe that, if Brown was so exercised about the parliamentary expenses scandal, he should at some point in the past twelve years have noticed it and done something about it.

Brown, it is true, labors under some particular and individual burdens. He is not charismatic in the way that his predecessor, Tony Blair, undoubtedly was, and he has not been able to sell his brand of dour Scottish gravitas. Being stern in times of crisis worked for Churchill, so the task is not inherently impossible — but Brown has failed to pull it off, perhaps because, unlike Churchill, Brown often seems a man who lacks all hope.

The comparison with Blair, and with Churchill, is doubly damaging, because it exemplifies the Eden Effect. This is twentieth-century Britain’s tendency to follow, as one historian put it, Paganini with the village fiddler. After Salisbury, there was Balfour. After Baldwin, came Chamberlain. Following Churchill, there was Eden. Wilson dominated the system, while Callaghan did not. Thatcher was a legend, whereas Major was merely a nice man. And Blair won three elections, while Brown looks unlikely to survive for three years. The Eden Effect is so powerful that Brown would have had to perform a political miracle to beat it.

The main features of the election results are, by now, obvious. First, a collapse in Labour’s vote, down to under 16% in the European elections, and in Labour’s share of local government. Second, the fact that the Liberal Democrats, if anything, lost ground, meaning that they are no longer the party of choice for those disillusioned with Labour. Third, the modest rise in the Tory vote, and the complete Conservative domination of local government.

All that might be seen to fall within the normal gamut of politics: governments, after all, exist to get beaten. But three further features are outside the norm. Fourth, the very low turnout, which is both a reflection of and a contributor to the ongoing decay of Britain’s post-war – and, indeed, basically Victorian – political model. Fifth, the fact that about 40% of the European vote went to one of the so-called minor parties: the UK Independence Party, the British National Party, the Greens, the Scottish Nationalists, and other even smaller entities. And sixth, the fact that the Eurosceptic parties – the Tories and UKIP – drew almost 50% of the vote.

Taken all in all, this election was about one thing: rejecting the establishment, be that Labour or the EU – or, in the case of the SNP’s supporters, the Union. It might be thought curious that voting Conservative is now a protest vote, but given the social democratic dominance of Britain since 1997, it makes perfect sense. And much the same can be said of voters all across Europe, who, by and large, also drifted rightward, if they bothered to vote at all. Britain is more Eurosceptic than most of the continent, and in even deeper economic difficulties, so its revolt was larger. But across the EU, the votes that were cast ran against the makers of the left-leaning order.

Among academics who follow British politics, the internet is now alive with excited discussions about the ‘end of neoliberalism,’ the inevitable failure of the Cameron Conservatives, and the incipient rise of fascism in Britain. All that goes to show how deep the political partialities in the academy run: the wish, in most cases, is father to the thought. If neoliberalism means anything, it must mean some effort to restrain the growth of the state. By that definition, the Blair/Brown governments began to move away from neoliberalism in 1999, when spending began its first surge, and completed the break in 2007, when spending surged again. Brown’s defeat is not the end of neoliberalism: it is, if anything, a reassertion of it.

The question of whether or not Cameron is a good model for the GOP, or American conservatism, has been much debated. But, regardless of where one stands on this question, the fact is that while oppositions can move to the right or to the left, they remain the opposition. It is the government that makes the laws, because it is the government that commands a majority. Far from Cameron being in dire straights – trapped, it is argued, between a sublimated desire to cut spending and the supposed necessity of raising taxes to balance the budget – it is Labour that is in a hole, because it has lost the basis for its majority. Blair made Labour electable by moving it to the right, and, really, into the middle class. But the straddle has stopped working: too many working class or lower-middle class voters who used to vote Labour now regard it as the party of metropolitan liberalism, and last week, they stayed home or voted for other parties. It will be very difficult to rebuild this Blairite coalition, because the cracks in that coalition grew wider the longer the party succeeded in keeping them papered over.

The upshot is the much-discussed ‘breakthrough’ of the British National Party, which won two European seats. The BNP is commonly described as ‘far-right,’ but the reality is rather more complicated. First, as breakthroughs go, this was pretty feeble stuff. The BNP’s vote, on 6.2%, was up by only 1.3% from 2004. Second, the BNP won a European seat in Yorkshire only because of the collapse of the Labour vote. The European elections operate on a convoluted system of proportional representations that rewards taking a larger share of the vote: the BNP’s vote total in Yorkshire went down, but its share of the vote went up because Labour did so poorly. Third, the BNP is, substantially, a protest vote: a new poll finds that 46% of BNP voters “said they registered a protest vote because they felt the three main parties were indistinguishable.”

It is a myth that all workers have always supported the Labour Party. A moment’s thought will go to prove that the Tories could not have won so many elections after 1945 if they were taking only the votes of the rich. The voters who went for the BNP last week have two natural homes: the traditional, patriotic Labour Party of Ernest Bevin, or the traditional, patriotic Conservative Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Britain, like the U.S., is that it has a strong, popular Conservative tradition to bring voters like this – they exist in all democracies – into the fold. As Michael Burleigh points out in his superb history of the Third Reich, one of the reasons why the continent has been prone to political extremism is precisely because it lacks this tradition.

Today, the BNP is not easily described in conventional right-left terms. It is anti-immigration. It opposes the EU. It also opposes free trade and advances a populist and corporatist economic program. And it draws its support from the upper ranks of the white working class, and the lower reaches of the middle class. In the 1970s, these voters would likely have been Labour supporters of Conservative Enoch Powell. Politically, therefore, they are hard to place, because they are with Labour by class, but with the Tories whenever Labour seems to fail to put Britain first.

Enoch Powell was a phenomena for many reasons. But one was that, before the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, the parties looked a lot alike, and none of their solutions appeared to be working. As some BNP supporters believe is true today, there was then no clear blue water between Conservatives and Labour: Powell provided an alternative. In the 1980s, the success of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government gave these voters a home; in the late 1990s, Blair, who ran in 1997 on a strongly patriotic platform, gave them another. But the decay of the Blairite coalition, which came to seem more and more aligned with the City of London, and more and more elite, left them in the wilderness. The BNP’s success – exaggerated though it is – is the natural result. Labour has lost these voters, but the Tories have not yet succeeded in gaining them.

There are the making of a tremendous Conservative coalition in Britain. The Tories themselves are back in a big way. UKIP is a Eurosceptic shot across the bow, but it took so many votes last week, paradoxically, because many voters agree with UKIP in holding the EU in low regard: the voters therefore feel free to vote UKIP because they do not much care about the European Parliament. When they are voting for a British government, they will be much less interested in voting for a symbol, because they will care about the results.

The end of the Labour coalition is manifest. The makings of the next Conservative coalition are there. No other party can challenge for it. David Cameron’s test was not beating Gordon Brown. Given the patterns of twentieth century British history, Brown was always likely to beat himself. Cameron’s real test now is before him: if he can pull together the strands of this coalition, he will win a historic victory on the scale of Blair’s 1997 triumph.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

Of course, critics might say that that is part of the problem. Indeed, that is precisely what they do say: no less than David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, has called for “a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities. From the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy.” This call does not come out of a clear blue sky: indeed, it is a direct response to the scandals that have rocked all the major parties over the past month. Gordon Brown has had problems of his own – a Labour effort to establish a deniable ‘dirty tricks’ team backfired spectacularly – but the main scandal crosses party lines.

In outline, it is simple enough: MPs from all parties have been caught submitting dubious expense receipts. The varieties of alleged misconduct are almost endless, and range from minor claims for travel to more serious questions about the purchase and sale of second homes, and occasionally, for moat cleaning. The amounts in question are, as scandals go, not terribly large, which makes it a very British scandal: only in Britain could a leading member of the Socialist Campaign Group, and a Labour MP, get into hot water for spending 1,100 pounds on up-market wallpaper.

But as always, it is not just the facts that hurt: it is the effort to conceal them that really makes the scandal. The Speaker of the House, Michael Martin, was forced out on May 20, when it became clear that he had lost the confidence of all sides of the House after he attacked backbenchers who were raising questions about the scandal. Already, at least ten MPs have announced they will not contest the next election, and the Times is projecting that, at the next general election, at least 325 MPs – over half the House – will stand down or lose their seat. If that comes to pass, it would create the largest incoming class of MPs since the great Labour victory in 1945.

In these circumstances, the elections matter. No MPs will lose their seats as a result of them, though one could lose his job: a crushing defeat for Labour might force Gordon Brown to depart No. 10 before the next election, which on present betting will not come until May 2010. But apart from that exciting, though now somewhat unlikely, possibility, the scandals and the elections have come together to bring front and center a problem that has sat on the side of the stage for over a decade, and to give the voters a chance to say something about it.

The problem, simply, is that Britain is both over and under-centralized. It is over-centralized in that, depending on how you define the terms, English local authorities receive between 68% and 75% of their funding from central government. That is why local government barely matters. Labour’s reliance on a top-down model of targets and planning has only made this problem worse. But it is also under-centralized in that, while Parliament dominates the nation, it is itself increasingly dominated by the European Union, which is already responsible for much of the law-making in Britain and which, through the Lisbon Treaty, is trying to control a good deal more.

The result, not surprisingly, has been the growth of a culture of irresponsibility in Parliament. The expenses scandal is eye-catching, and important, but it is only a minor part of the problem: the Commons also devotes far too little serious attention to matters such as the national defense. Parliament has come to combine the worst features of over-centralized big government and irrelevance: it claims to run everything, fails to deliver and loses creditability as a result, and suffers from the quiet sense that it no longer matters as much as it used to. In those circumstances – especially with a government wobbling from crisis to crisis, and therefore unwilling to upset its MPs by encouraging them to scale back on their claims – the temptation to indulge in nice wallpaper was evidently irresistible for many. Indeed, with so much money flowing through the system, and so little attention being paid, it was inevitable.

Monetary corruption is the least interesting kind of scandal, because its motives are so obvious. But it is revealing that the expenses scandal was exposed by a U.S.-born investigative journalist, Heather Brooke. Politics in Britain are extremely open by the standards of every other country in the world, except the United States. From that perspective, the question is not, so much, whether the public should know more about what goes on in Britain. It is what is going on Germany, France, the E.U., the U.N., or any other nation or international organization where public visibility is almost entirely absent. Actually, it is obviously a bad sign that we have to guess about this: if the British system concealed these relatively minor abuses, it is safe to say that the much more closed systems, in spite of their pretensions to moral superiority, hide far greater ugliness.

But if a lack of sunshine usually breeds scandal, the reaction of the voters when the facts were finally revealed was equally inevitable: an outburst of anger at MPs who appeared to believe that they belonged not only to the political class, but to a privileged one as well. Neither the privilege nor the anger is an entirely healthy phenomenon. At the root of the problem is the de-Victorianization of British politics, and British society more broadly. It is impossible to imagine William Gladstone – or, for that matter, Clement Attlee – tolerating, much less engaging in, this sort of behavior. In place of the standards and ideals of the Victorian era, Britain increasing has only those of the generation of the 1960s, which was basically scornful of both politicians (which it viewed as part of the system) and the concept of disinterested public service (which it argued was simply a cover for the interests of the establishment). Britain is now well into the second generation of this problem, and the public anger, no matter how understandable, will only make it worse.

It is a particularly bad sign that the idea of moving to proportional representation (PR), from the current first past the post system, has floated back to the surface in Britain as a result of the scandal. This idea has sloshed around in British politics since the mid-19th century: its backers have tended to be either high-minded intellectuals or liberals with a keen sense of the injustices that the first past the post system does to their own electoral prospects. Its basic flaw is two-fold. First, elections in Britain are not held to mirror public opinion: they are held to make a government. PR would reduce the strength and coherence of the major parties, and turn the Commons from a collection of parties into a collection of opinions. For those who believe in party government in parliamentary systems, that is not an appealing prospect.

The other flaw is that PR is about changing the machinery of politics, not its content. Its backers have devised innumerable clever arguments to sustain their belief that changing the waterwheel will affect the fall of the water, but none of them are persuasive. The problem the British political system is not basically one of structure: it is one of ideas, and the consequences these ideas have had for structures. The centralization of Britain has been a deliberate policy, as has the move into Europe. If public belief in the system is to be restored, governments need to stop advancing wrong-headed and destructive initiatives. No change in the electoral system can guarantee that.

The first thought of many was that the Conservative Party was likely to be the major beneficiary from the expenses scandal. It is, after all, Labour’s opposition. But so far, the scandal has benefited none of the major parties. That is partly because it is not possible to say that Tory MPs, on the whole, have behaved any better than Labour’s: if Labour has more problem MPs, it is only because they have more MPs overall. But, more fundamentally, it is because the Conservative Party is the most successful modern political party in the world, so anything that discredits the British political system is likely to hurt the Conservatives.

And that is exactly what has happened. In early May, the Tories had pulled out a lead, depending on the poll, of between 6 and 15 points in European voting intentions. But as the public had a chance to think it over, the Tories fell back to a mid-single digit lead over Labour: as a result, Gordon Brown may, weirdly, be the scandal’s foremost beneficiary. In party terms, the beneficiary was not the Liberal Democrats, who have also dropped slightly, but the nationalist and minor parties: the Scottish Nationalists, the British National Party (BNP), and the UK Independence Party. In the latest Telegraph poll, the BNP and UKIP alone had 23% support in Britain as a whole, while the Scottish Nationalists – in what may have been a rogue poll – drew 43% in Scotland.

The BNP is commonly described as far-right, though its program of economic nationalization and protectionism is far-left and it draws much of its support from alienated Labour voters: it has advertised itself as “the Labour Party your father voted for.” UKIP’s appeal revolves around the widespread dislike of the EU. What both parties have in common is that they are anti-establishment in appeal, which is magnified by the fact that the major parties spend so much time condemning them and thereby reinforcing their appeal for the disaffected. In a broader sense, the Scottish Nationalists, too, are anti-establishment, the establishment being the United Kingdom. When scandals undermine the system, these parties are the natural beneficiaries.

In political terms, the situation in Britain is now much like that of 1962, when a tiring government (Conservative then, Labour now) faced an opposition (Labour then, Conservative now) that had not fully found its feet. The beneficiary then was the Liberal Party, which benefited from the fact that it was not the establishment and enjoyed a brief, shocking burst of popularity. Now, almost fifty years later, the Liberal Democrats – the descendents of those Liberals – are a mainstream alternative. If voters want to smash the system, voting Lib Dem is not the way to do it.

It will not be at all easy for any of the minor parties today to repeat the long-term survival of the Liberal Democrats: in a first past the post system, it is hard enough to keep three major parties going. Quite likely, the European and local elections, like many Parliamentary by-elections, will see a large protest vote (and an even larger stay at home vote for ‘none of the above’), and a return come the general election to the three major parties. But what is unlikely is not impossible: watch the vote for the minor parties. And watch Scotland: if Labour loses badly, and the Tories fail to advance, Scotland will have taken a portentous step towards breaking up the United Kingdom.

The vote for the minor parties is not, just, a measure of alienation from the major parties. It is also a measure of the unpopularity of the European Union. The BNP and UKIP are – in quite different ways, and drawing on quite different groups of voters – both skeptical about the EU. The incoming Tory MPs are likely to feel the same way: one recent survey found that 94 percent of all Tory candidates agreed that Britain has transferred too much power to the EU. And the broader public agrees: a recent ICM/Taxpayers Alliance poll found 75% opposed Britain joining the Euro, and 62% saying they would vote against the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum. The irony is that when Britain votes on June 4, many of those voting will be participating in a European system that they dislike, or even actively oppose.

There is one further irony. The results of the June elections are likely to show that British Euroskepticism continues to gain strength. And, as Cameron has noted, there is a very coherent case to be made that Britain’s move into Europe is part and parcel of its broader retreat from responsible, limited, parliamentary government, and that the logical cure is to back away from the EU. All this makes excellent sense.

But it will not be popular in Washington, where the new Obama Administration is more enthusiastically pro-European than any administration since Kennedy’s. The outcome of the elections is likely, therefore, to create storms not only for the Union, but for the Special Relationship. The sooner both sides of that relationship realize this, the better equipped Britain will be to fight its corner against American demands that it continue its fifty year slide into the elitist, undemocratic European experiment.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

It was the first nation founded in an act of rebellion against a colonial power. It was the first nation founded on the belief that the rights of man are inherent and God-given, and that the powers of the government derive from the consent of the people. It was, therefore, the first nation to recognize that the state must be limited to the powers granted by the people, and to recognize explicitly that the state was founded to secure their rights. It was the first nation to be based on a separation of powers, and on the clear subordination of the military to civilian rule. And it was the first nation to state all of this in a constitution that was publicly debated and democratically accepted.

Other nations – Britain, most notably – share in some of these traditions, and that is not surprisingly, because the United States was deeply influenced by ideas born in England in the 17th century. But precisely because the U.S. was founded – whereas Britain evolved – the U.S. exemplifies these virtues in their purest form. That is why it is exceptional. And that is a fact that has been recognized by Europeans for centuries.

Many of the great works of American interpretation – from Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, to Tocqueville’s great Democracy in America, to Lord James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, were written by foreigners who accepted that America was exceptional, and wanted to understand why. And hundreds of other eminent Europeans – from Charles Dickens to Charles Dilke – visited the U.S. for the same purpose: to understand a place that was like nothing else in the world.

By and large, the conservatives disliked the U.S., and the liberals liked it. There was a good reason for that: the U.S. was founded on liberal values, and in its acceptance of modernity, its everyday equality of manners, the freedom of movement within it, its mix of immigrants, and the protections and praise it gave to property-holding by all classes, it was, in the terms of the nineteenth century, a profoundly liberal country. Of course, as European observers realized, it was also deeply conservative in its attachment to the order established in 1776 and 1787. But that core of conservatism, the more perceptive among them concluded, was precisely what made it possible for it to sustain its liberalism, what prevented it from breaking down as the traditionalist European conservatives hoped it would.

American scholars agreed with the liberal Europeans. Much of American scholarship was devoted, in one way or another, to explaining why the United States was exceptional. The effort reached a peak with Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier, but it continued well into the 20th century. After World War II, indeed, it led to the creation of American Studies, an entirely new academic discipline founded on the argument that, now that the U.S. was a world power, we needed to understand ourselves, and explain our unusual ways to others, with greater clarity.

Those ways were, indeed, unusual. Most Americans believe the U.S. is exceptional, but we often forget just how unusual a country this is. The U.S. has a remarkable free speech tradition, which given tremendous protections to the press and to those accused of libel. It separates church and state in a way that is still rare, even in Europe. It gives rights to those accused of crimes that are unparalleled in history, or elsewhere in the world. It has a more open government than any other nation, one that gives citizens unprecedented access to its doings.

And, while like all nations it controls its borders, it has welcomed more immigrants from more places than any other nation in the world. Indeed, the popularity of the U.S. as a destination for immigrants is the ultimate proof that it is, indeed, exceptional. Emigration is the greatest and most democratic election in the world, because it is based on the individual decisions of millions. The U.S. has been winning that great election since it was founded.

In some ways, such as its very liberal abortion laws, the U.S. is exceptional in ways that conservatives dislike. But by and large, conservatives today celebrate American exceptionalism. That is curious, in a way, because so much of what makes the U.S. exceptional is liberal in origin. But that simply goes to make Tocqueville’s point: the U.S. has a liberal tradition and a conservative attachment to it.

Now, wipe all that from your mind. Forget the history, forget Tocqueville, forget generations of scholarship, forget the existence of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, forget the heroes like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy who testified to it, forget the fact that we are all the children of immigrants, and forget the evidence of your own eyes. In the American academy today, and in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, the claim that the U.S. is exceptional is viewed with skepticism, or with scorn.

This is a difficult fact for most Americans to accept, or to believe, but for these elites, the word ‘exceptionalism’ is criticism, not praise. In the academy, where I spent more than twenty years, ‘American exceptionalism’ is treated, at best, as a myth born of self-righteous national chauvinism. At worst, it is a badly-disguised code word for knuckle-dragging reactionaries and closet fascists. Nothing pinpoints you as a conservative in the American academy faster than referring to American exceptionalism without a sneer, and nothing ingratiates you faster than dismissing anyone who believes in it as a dangerous right-winger and an historical ignoramus.

President Obama was educated in this academy – BA from Columbia University, JD from Harvard Law – so it is no surprise that he shares its dismissive attitude towards ‘American exceptionalism.’ When asked by a reporter in France if he believed in it, his response was characteristic: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

It is one thing – and it is quite right – for an American president to recognize that other nations have their own patriotisms. Americans are not shocked by this: in fact, they are only shocked when citizens of other countries are not proud of their homelands. But it is quite another thing for an American president to make American exceptionalism into a statement of personal opinion, into something that is as valid, or invalid, as any other opinion.

All nations may be special to their citizens, but the United States, historically, is unique. If the President of the United States cannot bring himself to make this claim, which is both true and a basic part of fulfilling his duty as the leader of the nation, then he has aligned himself with the claim’s opponents, albeit it with the gentler ones. That is something that no previous president, from either party, has done.

And that pattern has carried through in the President’s nominations. The foremost example is Harold Koh, the former Dean of the Yale Law School , nominated as Legal Adviser to the State Department. Koh recognizes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation. For him, this is a serious problem, one the American judiciary needs to redress. For example, in a 2003 article “On American Exceptionalism,” published in the Stanford Law Review, Koh acknowledges that the U.S. affords far greater protection than most countries to speech and the press. For Koh, this is cause for a measure of concern:

On examination, I do not find this distinctiveness too deeply unsettling to world order. The judicial doctrine of “margin of appreciation,” familiar in European Union law, permits sufficient national variance as to promote tolerance of some measure of this kind of rights distinctiveness.

So, the U.S.’s differences from the rest of the world are not “too deeply unsettling” and, thanks to EU law, can be tolerated to “some measure.” But how far, exactly, should they be tolerated? In a footnote, Koh gives his answer: the courts should reinterpret the U.S.’s free speech tradition so it does not cause problems abroad:

in a globalizing world, our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet. In my view, however, our Supreme Court can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation.

And that is not an isolated example. For Koh, all American exceptionalism is bad: the only relevant question is which part of the tradition is the worst. Koh concludes that:

I prefer to distinguish among four somewhat different faces of American exceptionalism, which I call, in order of ascending opprobrium: distinctive rights, different labels, the ‘flying buttress’ mentality, and double standards. In my view, the fourth face – double standards – presents the most dangerous and destructive form of American exceptionalism.

The least dangerous are America’s distinctive rights, such as free speech: these can be tolerated to some extent, though they should be reinterpreted if they pose problems. The ‘different labels’ problem is Koh’s attack on the American refusal – as he sees it – to use internationally-recognized terms to describe practices that the U.S. rejects. According to Koh, this is a perverse relic of history, “a quirky, nonintegrationist feature of our cultural distinctiveness (akin to our continuing use of feet and inches, rather than the metric system).”

More accurately, it is a result of the fact that the U.S. is a federal nation, and the various states have the power and the right to report statistics using terms of their own choice. Similarly, the national government is ultimately responsible to the American people, not the preferences of international organization – though Koh would not accept that point. What matters is that the government is following its own laws, which prescribe certain terms.

The other facet of the ‘labels’ problem, as Koh sees it, are America’s “exclusionary treaty practices – e.g., nonratification, ratification with reservations, and the non-self-executing treaty doctrine.” In other words, if the U.S. decides not to ratify a treaty or to ratify it partially, or if it argues that treaties must be backed up by Congressional passage of supporting legislation, this too is exceptionalist, and a problem. It is not as serious a problem as the ones higher on his list, but, yes: the simple fact that the Senate has exercised its constitutional right not to ratify a treaty is, according to Koh, a worrying piece of American exceptionalism.

The third aspect of American exceptionalism – and this is where Koh’s anger begins to mount – is its “flying buttress mentality.” In other words, the U.S. claims to be a pillar of human rights, but it is really a flying buttress: it is “willing to stand outside the structure supporting it, but unwilling to subject itself to the critical examination and rules of that structure.” Koh refers here explicitly to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a thoroughly destructive but widely-ratified treaty, though he could easily adduce others, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, that fall into the same pattern.

Koh is making the claim not that the U.S. is a serial abuser of children, but that failing to ratify treaties that other nations have signed, regardless of how good or bad the treaty is, or how serious or frivolous the signatures of the others are, is an example of a “promiscuous failure.” Indeed, in a May 8, 2001 op-ed in the Washington Post, Koh attacked the U.S. for failing to ratify treaties that “far less law-abiding countries” have signed.

This is a startlingly naïve claim. It does not appear to have occurred to Koh that the fact that many “far less-law abiding” countries have signed a treaty might be a valid reason for the U.S. to refuse to sign on: if the other signatories are not law-abiding, the treaty is worthless, because the signatories will not obey it. More broadly, Koh ignores the fact that the reason why the U.S. has refused to ratify many treaties is because he, and his supporters, have driven the train of international treaty-making so fast that the wheels have come off: treaties have become unenforceable expressions of aspirations, not serious national commitments. In those circumstances, the U.S. is being responsible, not irresponsible, by refusing to ratify.

Finally, there is Koh’s fourth area, “double standards,” when “the United States actually uses its exceptional power and wealth to promote a double standard.” By “double standard,” Koh does not mean what most people do by that term: that the U.S. does one thing but encourages or forces other to do another. He criticizes the U.S. for declining to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, but this is not a double standard: it is simply an example of the U.S. not ratifying a treaty of which Koh approves. Other nations remain entirely free to ratify, or not to do so.

For Koh, in short, “double standard” means that the U.S. is doing something different, and something he dislikes, from other nations. But that is inherent in the right of self-government, which is the fundamental part of the American exceptionalist tradition. Even for those who want the U.S. to ratify all the treaties to which it is not currently party, it should be infinitely more important for the U.S. to retain the right of self-government, which includes the right to accept or reject treaties. Those treaties, important though they are – and as bad as conservatives correctly believe them to be – are ultimately unimportant compared to the right of self-government that Koh is denigrating with his attack on the hypocrisy of the U.S. for exercising it.

The problem that liberal elites today have with American exceptionalism is simple to sum up. Before the mid-1960s, most liberals believed in it. But then 1968 happened, and the New Left took over the academy and the intellectual leadership of the Democratic Party. The New Left was not rebelling against American conservatism, which in the mid-1960s was still nascent. It was rebelling against American liberalism, and – among much else – against its belief in the basic goodness and exceptionalness of America. American conservatism is, really, a rebellion against that rebellion, fortified by the neo-conservatives who split away from American liberalism when they realized it was being taken over by the radicals.

The more moderate Democratic leaders – Bill Clinton, preeminently – have resisted the New Left, but the tendencies of the party’s activists and elite are fundamentally opposed to American exceptionalism. It is in their hearts, and they can do no other. For the post-war liberals, the U.S. was liberal and modern. For the New Left, it is Europe that holds that crown: to believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that the U.S. should not be Europeanized.

And it is from those activists and from that elite that Barack Obama springs. His dismissive treatment of American exceptionalism places him more quickly and accurately than anything else he has said. Bill Clinton was heralded as the first Baby Boomer President, but if the Baby Boomers were the Generation of 1968, that title more accurately belongs to Obama. The realities of governing, as he is painfully discovering, will pull Obama one way, but his instincts – as reflected in his nominations, and his public remarks – will pull him the other, in a direction that Truman and Kennedy would have scorned.

This will be – indeed, it is being – hailed as the triumph of liberalism. But in reality it is an attack on it, and on the tradition of American exceptionalism that embodies it. It is equally an assault on the conservative belief that the United States must uphold the source of that exceptionalism, the legacies of 1776 and 1787. For the first time in its history, the United States has a president who has broken with the bipartisan tradition of his predecessors by refusing to state, proudly, that the nation he leads is exceptional. He has nothing to gain from refusing to state this, so he must believe it. And that is a somber reflection for Memorial Day.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

The second is that every administration is evaluated at the hundred day mark. This tradition began as a way to sum up FDR’s burst of legislative activity in early 1933, but as no administration since then has matched FDR’s hyperactive pace, it has became the prescribed moment to describe and explain the new administration’s doctrine.

This endeavor comes with an obvious danger: there were, for instance, several Bush Doctrines, and none of the better-known ones were in evidence before 9/11. It may not be entirely true that, as Lincoln claimed, events control the president, but they certainly shape his doctrine. Both Harold Macmillan (“events, dear boy, events”) and Margaret Thatcher warned that the iron law of government is that no one can stop the unexpected from happening.

One way to assess the Obama’s administration’s doctrine is to look at its appointees and to try to discern a pattern. This is not a terribly useful approach, partly because many of the posts requiring confirmation remain unfilled, and – more fundamentally – because there is not much of a pattern to discern.

As its Ambassador to the U.N., Obama picked Susan Rice, a standard-issue international institutionalist. To balance Rice’s seemingly unmitigated faith in the U.N. there is Samantha Power, who made her name in the early 2000s by calling for more assertive U.S. interventions to stop genocide – and in 2008 by calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Power has now taken a place on the National Security Council.

To Iraq, the administration seeks to dispatch Christopher Hill, who was previously responsible for managing George W. Bush’s not entirely successful approach to North Korean nuclear disarmament. To assess intelligence, the administration selected a believer in the conspiratorial power of the Jewish lobby and a vehement opponent of Israel (fortunately, he withdrew). And of course Hillary Clinton herself, a supporter of Israel who voted in favor of the Iraq War, has landed at the State Department. A friendly observer might call this a balanced collection of appointees; a less favorably inclined one could just as easily call it incoherent.

If the appointees do not offer much of a clue, how about actions? The friendly observer would say that the new administration marks a refreshing break from George W. Bush; the less friendly one would observe that many of Obama’s more substantive actions (drawing down slowing in Iraq and surging in Afghanistan, for instance) have paralleled Bush’s policies, while his style (smiling at while being mocked by Hugo Chavez, for instance) is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s early humiliation by Nikita Khrushchev. In other words, actions bear about as little weight as appointees: the problem is not too little evidence, but too much, and all pointing in different directions.

The administration does not have a doctrine. It has three, all in search of a president who has yet to decide – if he ever will – which one to back. The first is simple to name, if less easy for conservatives to fathom: liberal naiveté. The fallacy of liberalism in the realm of foreign policy since the late 1960s is simply that it has not been serious. Theirs has been the diplomacy of solipsism, the belief that you are the only thing that exists in the world.

Liberals want to believe that what happens in the world is a reflection of American misdeeds, or a manifestation of an American failure to act. Thus, the reason why Putin’s Russia, for instance, has been so nasty is that George W. Bush provoked it, or that the reason why Iran wants a nuclear weapon is because the U.S. has failed to be sufficiently nice to it. From this point of view, what the U.S. needs to do is to apologize a lot more. Obama has done a good deal of that – to audiences in Europe, Iran, and Latin America – in his first 100 days.

Or, to take the case of American inaction, the U.S. – as Power has argued – bears part of the blame for genocides in Africa because it does not do enough to stop them, and is at fault – as Senator Boxer (D-CA) has implied – for the Taliban’s oppression of women because it has not ratified the appropriate treaties. All this is self-absorbed nonsense that stems from the basic alienation of post-1968 liberals from mainstream America. The alienation creates the ‘blame America first’ mentality and provides a built-in explanation for the misbehavior of others: it’s all our fault.

The best one can say about this doctrine is that, in its own way, it does reflect a sincere interest in foreign policy. It is ignorant and naïve, but it does at least care about the broader world. And, in time, it is likely to be corrected by experience: Clinton, pushed by Tony Blair, finally summoned up the nerve to stop apologizing for Rwanda and act in Kosovo, and Carter eventually got tired of being fooled by the Soviets and abused by the Iranians, even if he never quite figured out what to do about it. So if this is where Obama’s headed, he and we are in for a rough ride.

But it may be that the administration is more than inexperienced, liberal, and muddled-headed. It may have a plan. The second doctrine is less easy to sum up. In a word, you could call it realism, though I prefer to call it ‘Metternich without the genius,’ after the mid-nineteenth century Austrian conservative statesman who dominated Europe in the thirty years after the Congress of Vienna.

This was the era of the Concert of Europe: a (supposedly) well-balanced system, in which each of the five great European powers controlled a sphere of interest that was respected by the others, and who cooperated to control threats that would destabilize the system and lead to another French Revolution and a new Napoleon.

The essence of the problem, as Metternich saw it, was to control the rise of middle class liberalism, which threatened the old order across Europe. In the end, in 1848, he lost that battle, but his defeat only proved that – from his aristocratic point of view – he had understood the nature of the threat all too clearly, even if he had not provided effectively against it. Given that his goal was to preserve the existing European order indefinitely, it is hard to see how he could have succeeded.

Metternich’s system was premised on the cooperation and mutual respect of the great imperial powers, and on the creation of well-understood spheres of interest. Obama might claim the same. He has been far more deferential to the European Union than any previous president, so the E.U. will have a sphere. His attempted rapprochement with Russia (and his neglect of Georgia) implies that Putin will be allowed to win back effective control of the ‘Near Abroad.’ In the Middle East, he has been solicitous of the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” implying that he recognizes its legitimacy and has no complaints about Iran’s incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. And he has said nothing about promoting liberty abroad: if Metternich’s policy had a keynote, it was that ideas about democracy were profoundly destabilizing and had at all costs to be repressed.

This is a coherent policy, based – like the first doctrine – on a serious interest in foreign affairs. It has something in common – like Obama’s out of control domestic spending – with the presidency of Richard Nixon and the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger, in that it pays far more attention to power than it does to human rights. But it also has three serious flaws.

First, it is far from clear, as Kissinger discovered, that the American people will tolerate foreign policy conducted on the basis of amoral realism for very long. Second, this is a policy that tends to defer to the kinds of autocracies and dictatorships that are strong enough to claim a sphere of interest – but these places tend to be America’s enemies. By contrast, it neglects America’s closest partners, like Great Britain and America’s friends in Eastern Europe, because it views these allies as obstacles to better relations with the imperial spheres. And third, the spheres themselves are not likely to cooperate: the E.U., for instance, has no desire to see Russian control expand westward. This is not, therefore, a policy that will commend itself to the moral sense or the material interests of the American people, or for that matter, to the peace of the world.

The final doctrine is, frankly, at once the most discreditable and the most plausible. It is that this administration – or rather, this president – simply does not care all that much about foreign affairs. Obama came to the White House as with a background in law and ‘community organization.’ He beat the Republicans in part because of the financial crisis, but more fundamentally because of the unpopularity of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. There is nothing in his personal background or his rise to power that would encourage any observer to conclude that he is genuinely interested in, or encourage him to believe he has much to gain from, any sustained focus on foreign policy.

So perhaps Obama’s desire is, simply, to do as much as he can as rapidly as he can to clear the decks – with the goal of spending as much time as possible on domestic affairs, where he clearly has big plans – while allowing his subordinates to chase whatever policies they prefer as long as they cause no problems.

In other words, the explanation for the incoherence of the administration’s appointments is simple: they reflect the fact that there is no one hand on the tiller. Similarly, Obama’s mix of Bushian policies and liberal apologias may reflect nothing more than a belief that this mix is the best way to pacify as many problems as possible at once. From this perspective, the appointment of Hillary Clinton assumes a Machiavellian significance: Obama has given his bitter rival responsibility for issues about which he cares little, but she will be the one to go if the policies carried out in his name turn out to be failures. For Clinton, State is not a stepping stone: it is a deadweight.

The only problem with this strategy is that it neglects the insight of Macmillan and Thatcher: the world is not going to go away. It will not be possible to clear the decks, and the effort to do so will create problems of its own. This strategy relies for success on two things: being lucky and other people cooperating with you. But no strategy – as Carter discovered to his cost – can guarantee luck, and attempting to induce adversaries to cooperate by being agreeable will simply embolden them to take advantage of you.

Indeed, the Obama administration is already relying on luck, and the goodwill of others, to a startling extent. Having extended the hand of friendship to Iran, Obama will have no excuse available if Iran takes some obvious step that is blatantly against American interests. It is amazing that the administration has not shown more awareness of this dilemma.

Of course, it may be that none of these doctrines captures the reality. The first may be too sweeping; the second too conceptual; and the third based on insufficient evidence. Nor is it obviously a bad thing that there is not, yet, a clear Obama doctrine: given how badly Bush suffered from being tagged (however misleadingly) with his own doctrine, Obama might well feel that he will do better to tack from event to event. But that will not work for long. Like it or not, the world will find an Obama doctrine, and if he does not want to be defined, he will soon have to stop relying on his smile, the unpopularity of his predecessor, and the pliancy of the media, and start defining himself.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

But according to Koh, enforcement is not done primarily by states. It is done by transnational civil society, which is responsible not only for creating international human rights law, but for enforcing it. Given that premise, it is no wonder that, as Hathaway points out, the number of treaties that are signed do not correlate with improved human rights. Under Koh’s theory, the places that need the enforcing efforts of transnational civil society the most –- that is, the world’s dictatorships –- are the ones that have the least of it.

But all that is a matter of theory. What did Koh do in practice, when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the position he held from 1998 to 2001? Well, one approach to enforcing international human rights law, as Koh recognized, was to use “power and coercion,” i.e. to apply sanctions on the basis of conditionality until behavior improves. After having endorsed this in his work, Koh was uncomfortable with it in practice. In May 2000, he urged Congress not to link improved human rights in China with trading privileges in the U.S., telling the Washington Post on May 2 that, “We profoundly believe that conditionality will not advance the cause of religious freedom in China and will not improve the circumstances of any of the religious adherents about whom we are all deeply concerned.” Nor did he support the Durban boycott.

So if conditionality is problematic, and boycotts are out of the question, what remains? The answer, of course, is engagement. As Koh put it in 2000 in introducing a State Department report on religious freedom, the U.S. should “apply a policy of principled purposeful engagement.” This is the word that runs throughout most of Koh’s work, and it is, of course, the basis on which he urged the U.S. to participate in Durban. Koh is sensitive to the criticism that “engagement” may be seen as nothing more than talking: on the contrary, he emphasized in 1999 during Congressional testimony on human rights in China, it is frank talking. But the fact remains that it is simply talking, backed up neither by the “power and coercion” that he supposedly sanctioned, nor by the transnational civil society that he praises.

And in practice, Koh has been relentlessly credulous about the effectiveness of engagement. That is understandable, given that in practice he has little interest in any other approach -– and that engagement is also his strategy for promoting legal and political change in the U.S. On November 2, 2000, for example, Koh published a glowing op-ed in the Washington Post celebrating the opening of North Korea by the engagement diplomacy of Madeleine Albright. Nine years after this “breakthrough,” North Korea remains as closed, as oppressive, and as nasty as it was when he wrote in praise of Albright’s “global policy of principled, purposeful engagement . . . [by] using diplomatic dialogue with authoritarian governments to press for greater freedom for oppressed peoples.” In 2008, Freedom House reported that the North Korean “regime subjects thousands of political prisoners to brutal conditions, and collective or familial punishment for suspected dissent by an individual is also a common practice.”

In late 1998, Koh argued that his purpose in meeting with Slobodan Milosevic was to persuade the Yugoslavian dictator to embrace, as the Washington Post reported on December 24, a “wholesale package of reforms” that would resolve the Kosovo crisis. In the end, Milosevic was persuaded not by engagement, but by NATO’s air war. At the end of 1998, Koh was even attacked by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Human Rights in China for restarting an official dialogue on human rights just after China cracked down on the fledgling opposition China Democracy Party: According to a report in the South China Morning Post, the NGOs “believe[d] recent conduct by the Chinese Government makes a dialogue inappropriate and unlikely to be productive.” Koh did not agree, but the NGOs were right: ten years later, Freedom House continues to rank China as “Not Free” and to report on its “continued restrictions on the media and repression of those seen as challenging the regime.”

More broadly, Koh’s tenure from 1998 to 2001 was replete with celebratory statements about his successes at, or sorrowful reports of his failure in, international institutions such as the U.N. Human Rights Commission. For him, this was where the action of enforcing human rights was at. As he put it on April 18, 2000, in an official response to the Commission’s refusal to condemn China, “The Commission is the appropriate venue for members of the United Nations to discuss violations of human rights standards.” Few observers agreed with him: by 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan admitted that “the commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system.” The Commission’s credibility had declined because -– like its successor, the U.N. Human Rights Council -– it focused almost entirely on the supposed evils of Israel, and was led by such human rights luminaries as Sudan, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

But that did not matter to Koh. On May 8, 2001, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, he reacted with alarm to the fact that the U.S. had been voted off the U.N. Human Rights Commission. According to him, the Commission was, indeed, “filled with posturing and high-minded speeches by countries such as China and Cuba.” But it “has also showed an unrivaled capacity to spotlight abuses . . . . . Whether we like it or not, the commission will help develop the world’s multilateral agenda on human rights . . . . If we withdraw from that agenda . . . we will increasingly find ourselves its target.”

Of course, by being voted off the Commission, the U.S. had already been identified as a target. But for Koh, the explanation of that was simple: “Our belief in our global exceptionalism has too often led us to vote alone at the commission, falsely assuming that such isolationism has no costs.” Normally, “isolationism” is a pejorative term used to describe a policy of reducing official U.S. contacts with or involvement in the broader world. But according to Koh, even when the U.S. participates in an international institution, it is practicing “isolationism,” motivated by a belief in its own exceptionalism, if it votes against any measure favored by the majority. That sums up the problem with the “engagement” argument: it sounds like “let’s talk,” but in practice, it means “don’t rock the boat.”

The fact that others were busy rocking it in the real world, not the conference chamber, did not concern Koh. His condemnation of the U.S. continued: “far less law-abiding countries have ratified international treaties on economic, social and cultural rights . . . our Senate refuses even to hold hearings on the wisdom of joining these instruments.” This is a startlingly naïve claim. It does not appear to have occurred to Koh that the fact that many “far less-law abiding” countries have signed a treaty might be a valid reason for the U.S. to refuse to sign on: if the other signatories are not law-abiding, the treaty is worthless, because the signatories will not obey it.

Koh’s position comes down to a call for participation by the U.S., and enforcement through its courts, but a free ride for the law-breakers who, in his eyes, gave the treaty credibility by signing it in the first place: enforcement for me, but not for thee. The fact that these “far less law-abiding countries” were not likely to follow through on their commitments –- or, indeed, would use them as cover –- was not a central problem for Koh: for him, the real problem was that the U.S. had not signed on as well. The issue at stake was not enforcing treaties that had already been freely signed by the world’s states: it was on the need for the U.S. to hurry up and sign too. The one-way nature of these commitments, or the Senate’s reasoned worries about the treaties in question, were irrelevant.

All of this flows logically from Koh’s vision of enforcement: What matter most is transnational civil society, and it matters because –- as he claims –- it has the power to create legally-binding norms of behavior that can and must reach into societies, with or without the approval of the government and legislature of the day, and be applied by courts. This is not a vision that, for all Koh’s writings and experience, treats the problem of enforcement with seriousness, because it places the greatest emphasis on the places -– like the United States –- that need it the least, while passing off the infinitely harder challenges of places like North Korea, Zimbabwe, China, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela to the vagaries of the U.N., an institution in which the world’s less than democratic states have a majority. Nor is it a vision that does any favors to the concept of the treaty, which it diminishes by turning into a vehicle for unenforceable aspirations, or to the “advice and consent” role of the Senate, which it regards as an obstacle to the creation of yet more such aspirations.

The problem is not that the world has too few treaties. The problem is that the world has too many treaties, and especially too many human rights treaties. Their very profusion is a sign that they are not being enforced, and that activity in signing them is viewed as a substitute for achieving their aims. The move away from treaties and towards norms, a move that Koh has championed, only exacerbates this problem.

Instead of promoting human rights around the world, Koh’s vision is part of a broader campaign that has given cover to the world’s worst states, enhanced the credibility of the international institutions -– like the Durban Conference –- that they dominate, encouraged American diplomats such as former Secretary of State Albright to cheapen their position and their country by conducting credulous meetings with dictators, and focused much of his energy on devising transnational processes that are aimed, first and foremost, at the United States in general, and at evading the “advice and consent” role of the Senate in particular. This is already an influential vision. Before allowing it to grow further in strength, the Senate should consider carefully what it means for human liberty, for the diplomacy and courts of the United States, and for the future of its own Constitutional role.

But human rights treaties do not work that way. If you are a state and I am a state, and we sign an international convention promising, for example, to respect free speech, what am I supposed to do if you break your pledge? Impose restrictions on free speech at home in retaliation? Clearly not. By their very nature, because they are about internal behavior, not external conduct, human rights treaties pose an exceptionally difficult enforcement problem. That is one reason why, until relatively recently, few treaties focused on human rights.

There are certainly exceptions: Britain’s long-running campaign against the slave trade is a case in point, though even that comparison is vitiated by the fact that Britain was quite willing to use unilateral force to back up its diplomacy. But until the post-1945 era, and especially until the end of the Cold War, these unenforceable treaties were rare. That was because states regarded treaties as mutually binding, enforced commitments between states, and they were only willing to restrict their own sovereignty if others did so after negotiation and in a verifiable way.

But over the last forty years, the number of human rights treaties has exploded. Indeed, the very concept of human rights has changed. Now, as supporters such as Harold Koh at Yale Law School are proud to claim, issues like arms control are conceptualized as human rights problems. Koh views this as an advance, because it gave campaigners a way to make the issue appealing to everyone, which made it possible to move faster than arms control negotiations normally do. In reality, it is a retreat: fast treaties are not necessarily better ones, and by sweeping up arms control into the paradigm of human rights treaties, the unenforceable model of the latter has contaminated the old, enforceable model that used to be applied to the former.

From binding commitments, treaties have become unenforceable aspirations. That has made them very much easier to sign, which helps explain why there are so many human rights treaties in the world today: the cost of a signature is minimal, and the public relations benefits are considerable. But this says nothing about what this model of treaty-making has done for human rights. As Prof. Oona Hathaway at Yale Law School has summarized the problem:

[It] appears that treaty ratification is not infrequently associated with worse practices than otherwise expected. These findings can be explained in part . . . by the dual nature of treaties as both instrumental and expressive instruments. Treaties not only create binding law, but also declare or express the position of countries that ratify them. Because human rights treaties tend to be weakly monitored and enforced, countries that ratify may enjoy the benefits of this expression — including, perhaps, reduced pressure for improvements in practices-without bearing significant costs.

The problem is even worse, of course, when less-well defined ‘international norms’ stand in for treaties. For self-declared transnationalists like Koh – whose views and career are particularly relevant because he has been nominated as the State Department’s Legal Adviser – this vagueness is cause for celebration, not concern, because it means that norms supposedly having the same validity as international law can come from almost anywhere. This is fundamentally why Koh opposed the U.S. boycott of the 2001 Durban Conference: that carnival of anti-Semitism was, as he put it, part of the “emerging global agenda on race discrimination,” and it therefore had a basic validity that even its disgraceful excesses did not destroy. As Koh put it in his 1998 Frankel Lecture, later published in the Houston Law Review:

[L]aw-declaring fora thus include treaty regimes; domestic, regional, and international courts; ad hoc tribunals; domestic and regional legislatures; executive entities; commission of international publicists; and nongovernmental organizations.

But this remarkably broad claim about the origins of international law does not meet the main point: How are human rights treaties, or the even broader category of international norms, to be enforced? Koh’s answer on this point comes in two forms: his writings as a legal scholar, and his practice while Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the position he held from 1998 to 2001.

Koh addressed the point explicitly as a scholar in January 1998, in the Addison C. Harris Lecture at the University of Indiana School of Law, later published in the Fall 1999 number of the Indiana Law Journal. According to Koh, the simple answer – Hathaway’s answer – that international human rights law is often not enforced is wrong. On the contrary, it is “enforced through a complex, little-understood legal process that I call transnational legal process.” Koh acknowledges that there are other avenues:

[If] the United States is attempting to encourage China to follow norms of international human rights law . . . [it should] act at all five levels: the level of power and coercion, to apply external and political sanctions; at the level of self-interest, to develop carrots that can be offered to China in terms of trade benefits or other kinds of economic incentives; at the level of liberal theory . . . ; at the level of communitarian values, to seek to encourage China to ratify the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights . . .

But for Koh, the most important part of the process is the final, transnational level:

and finally, from a legal process perspective, to seek to engage the Chinese people . . . in a variety of international interactions that will cause them to internalize norms of international human rights law. . . . [W]e seek to encourage a change in the nature of the Chinese political identity to reconstitute China as a nation that abides by core norms of international human rights law.

Koh’s defenders often claim that he does not want to effect fundamental political change in the United States. The fact is that the process he identifies here for China is precisely the same process he sets out for the U.S. And that process is the process of transnationalism. So how, according to Koh, is international human rights law enforced?

Not, he acknowledges, by states: “the few mechanisms created had virtually no enforcement . . . . The overall picture . . . is one of impotence, ineffectiveness . . . .” Enforcement is the province not of states, but of “transnational norm entrepreneurs, government norm sponsors, transnational issue networks, interpretive communities and law-declaring fora, bureaucratic compliance procedures, and issue linkages . . . .” In short, for Koh, transnational civil society is responsible not only for creating international human rights law, but for enforcing it.

Given that premise, it is no wonder that, as Hathaway points out, the number of treaties that are signed do not correlate with improved human rights. Under Koh’s theory, the places that need the enforcing efforts of transnational civil society the most – that is, the world’s dictatorships – are the ones that have the least of it. On the other hand, from his point of view, Koh’s approach offers wonderful possibilities for changing the U.S., precisely because it is an open and liberal society. That, of course, is the point Koh contests: for him, it is the U.S., which he refers to as one of the world’s “skeptical” states, that is in need of change.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

The problem today, Koh argues, is that a few states – pre-eminently the U.S. – are obstructing this process. Koh’s favorite way to criticize the U.S. for this is by pointing to the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that the U.S. should pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Koh claims that “decent respect” requires supporting anything concerned with human rights that a majority of the world’s states have endorsed, and even requires U.S. courts to draw on the decisions of foreign courts and on treaties the U.S. has not signed.

As Koh put it in late 2008:

The next President should recall the words of our founders in the Declaration of Independence to pay ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind’ by supporting, not attacking, the institutions and treaties of international human rights law.

Or, in 2002:

[In] an interdependent world, United States courts should not decide cases without paying ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’

But here, in words that should be familiar to all Americans, is what the Declaration says:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The Declaration’s purpose was to tell the world the U.S. had a right to independence. The Founders believed it was necessary to pay “decent respect” by explaining why this was so. To transform this reasoned assertion of self-government and sovereignty into an argument that judgments in foreign courts should guide American judges, or that the U.S. should sign treaties simply because other states have done so is, at best, specious and distorted.

Koh has not been shy about expressing his transnationalist convictions. Indeed, one of the most troubling things about him is his willingness to lump “responsible lawyers, scholars, and human rights activists” together, as though they should be regarded as inseparable and equally authoritative. In his 2002 Robert L. Levine Distinguished Lecture at Fordham University, on “A World Drowning in Guns,” he argued that one of the most pressing issues facing the world is the need for, in his words, “the global regulation of small arms.” Koh is not alone in this belief: it is embodied in the long-running campaign for a U.N. treaty on the subject.

This campaign has recently born fruit. On October 31, 2008, the UN General Assembly voted by 145 to 2 against, with 18 abstentions, in favor of a resolution supporting the negotiation of an arms trade treaty. The U.S. cast one of the negative votes. The passage of the resolution resulted in the creation of a working group charged with the eventual drafting of a treaty to create common standards for the international import, export, and transfer of small arms. Koh’s views on global arms regulation therefore bear directly on a question he will be called to advise the State Department upon if he is confirmed by the Senate.

Koh is strongly in favor of building what he describes as a “global gun control regime.” His starting point is that small arms and light weapons – essentially, any weapon that can be carried – are responsible for most of the deaths in the world’s wars. This is entirely correct. Unfortunately, that is where his realism ends.

Koh believes that small arms are responsible for “dramatically fuel[ing] and inflam[ing] armed conflicts.” This theory has been popular among liberals since the 1920s and the campaign against the ‘Merchants of Death’ who supposedly caused the First World War. But the argument has little to recommend it: wars, and the accumulation of arms, are the product of underlying political rivalries, not their cause. As Koh acknowledges, the Rwandan genocide was carried out with machetes: if the hatreds are there, weapons will be found.

But for Koh, the only relevant question is how to bring global gun control into existence. As throughout his work, he called for aid in 2002 from a “transnational legal process.” This process begins with liberal NGOs who create networks around a problem as they define it, and develop so-called norms of behavior. Governments then create a “law-declaring forum” that embodies these norms and operates at a global level, and a “broader interpretive community” crystallizes to interpret and promote the norms in “a variety of settings.” This “community,” which includes U.S. judges, then draws on the interpretations it has fashioned to remake law and practice in the American setting.

The crucial step in this process is the interpretation of the norms, because it is those interpretations – provided by that supportive “community” – that decide what domestic law means. In this view, international law is not bottom up: it does not reflect what democratic political processes within nations decide to accept. Rather, it is top down: it is born of transnational advocacy, and then “internalized” by “responsible lawyers, scholars, and human rights activists” to refashion domestic society. From this point of view, international law is a set of norms that exists to be interpreted by liberal law school professors in the U.S. This turns international law into an expression of aspirations, not of democratically-sanctioned practice: build it, Koh implies, and the world will be forced to come along.

This is not a vision that pays “due respect” to the right of self-government. On the contrary, it has no patience with the idea that law should be created solely by the duly-elected representatives of the people and interpreted according to the Constitution. As a result, for example, Koh’s claim that the U.S. could support global gun control “without committing itself to a regime that would affront legitimate Second Amendment concerns” is meaningless. Like the rest of the Constitution, the “legitimate” concerns inherent in the Second Amendment are up for transnational redefinition. But Koh is right about one thing: the process he describes has driven the campaign behind the arms trade treaty.

Yet that campaign, for reasons that reveal the practical fallacies of the transnationalist vision, is a dangerous one. The General Assembly’s resolution calls for the treaty to create “common international standards” for the sale, purchase, and transfer of arms. The U.S. currently has arms embargoes against over twenty states. Most of these embargoes are not endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. is, therefore, one of the foremost violators of “common international standards” on the international sale of arms. Any effort to define such standards would risk the collapse of most of the U.S.’s embargoes.

That is precisely why Iran is an ardent backer of the treaty, which it argues would be an assault on “unilateral” U.S. arms control measures. By that, Iran means that the U.S. would lose its ability to have higher national standards, ones that forbid the sale of arms to Iran. Koh himself argues that it is essential to prevent arms from being transferred to “recognized human rights violators.” A treaty that would have to win the support of those human rights violators in order to be adopted worldwide is a treaty guaranteed not to make any distinctions between good and bad states.

Indeed, the U.N. resolution supporting the treaty proclaims that all states – unless subject to a U.N. Security Council embargo – have the right to buy arms. Under this doctrine, any supplier would be entirely within their rights to sell all conventional weaponry to the People’s Republic of China, Iran, or Burma. If the U.S. protested, the seller and buyer alike could correctly reply that the ‘right to buy’ was sanctified by a global consensus. There is no way to reconcile Koh’s call for advancing human rights with the reality that any global arms trade treaty will increase the power of repressive states to arm themselves and to threaten American interests.

Koh’s vision is influential. But the attention it devotes to the cruel, real world is wildly disproportionate to the attention it pays to the brave, new world of its aspirations. That is because it views treaties as, primarily, a learning experience. It is not particularly troubled by the thought that Iran, for example, might not be sincerely interested in negotiating a treaty intended to stop the transfer of arms to terrorists, because by its way of thinking, the real problem the world faces is not that Iran is a terrorist-supporting dictatorship. The world’s problem, in its view, is that the U.S. has failed to put “norms-based internationalism” into practice by signing enough treaties.

This vision has resulted in the proliferation of human rights treaties – a world drowning in law – often nominally backed by the world’s worst regimes. That hypocrisy, too, does not much bother the transnationalists, because for them, treaties exist not as mutually binding, enforced commitments between sovereign states. Rather, they are a form of political therapy for the U.S., intended to allow judges to legislate and scholars to lecture Americans into being global citizens. In their eyes, this is justified by the belief that the U.S is the foremost obstacle to world progress.

This is, needless to say, a profoundly political vision. And while many people object to it, Koh obviously has the right to believe what he does. But the position for which he has been nominated is not about activism: it is about law. As his equation of scholars, lawyers, and activists reveals, Koh views both historical and legal issues as inseparable from activist commitments. Koh’s misuse of the Declaration of Independence is telling: for him, it is more important to make the Declaration say what he wants it to say than to read it as it exists.

That may be a virtue for an activist, but for a lawyer – especially the State Department’s top lawyer – it is the wrong way to approach the serious professional responsibility of providing counsel. And as the example of the arms trade treaty demonstrates, it is also dangerous on its merits. So the proper question to ask as Koh approaches his nomination hearing is not, simply, what he believes. It is whether it is right for the government to have as one of its chief legal advisers a scholar and a lawyer who asserts that those roles are part and parcel of political activism.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.

A successful G-20 summit would conclude with American recognition that more spending, and any concessions to protectionism, is unwise, in return for a European realization that their own economic situation is dire and that what is needed is reforms, not more rules imposed by a new global regulator. But the most dangerous thing about summits like the G-20 is that they have to justify their existence by producing impressive-sounding agreements. Instead of promoting a return to reality, the G-20 is instead likely to give something to everyone, and thereby allow all concerned to indulge their worst tendencies.

It’s sad that France and Germany are on the right side of the stimulus spending divide, with Britain and America lined up in the wrong. But, for once, the continentals have a clearer grasp of the budgetary situation than the Anglo-Saxons. Right now, stimulus bills–in addition to being cover for permanently expanding the size of government–are all about preserving the unbalanced financial status quo of the past fifteen years.

The only difference is that, instead of American citizens doing the borrowing, the government has in effect nationalized their debts and then doubled down on them. The Obama administration is not breaking from the legacy it inherited from the Bush administration: it is reinforcing it. Instead of emphasizing saving, it is spending like no administration has spent before. The continentals, many of whom have made painful and somewhat successful efforts to bring their budget deficits under control in the past decade, are understandably appalled.

But the Europeans have their own illusions. Foremost among these is a simple one that, by itself, explains much of the vehemence of their criticism of the United States. The illusion is that the entire financial crisis is America’s fault, a result of its profligacy and poor regulation. The cure, they therefore believe, is for the U.S. to follow the European path of fiscal discipline and tight regulation. The result, according to France and Germany, will be a restoration of normalcy in Europe, which was unfairly sideswiped by the American collapse.

This is a fantasy. Except for the charge against American profligacy, it contains no truth. Like 1929–a precedent that should worry any sane observer–the 2008 collapse did begin in the U.S. But in both 1931 and 2009 it spread to Europe because both the European and the global financial system were fundamentally out of whack. A single stone does not start an avalanche unless the entire mountain is unbalanced. The first step for the Europeans, therefore, is to stop preaching, stop praising the European model, and start looking in the mirror.

The problems begin with the assumptions of European integration, and with the Euro. The admission of the countries of Eastern Europe to the EU may have made geopolitical sense, but it has been an economic fiasco. By expanding the EU, Europe’s leaders declared that Eastern Europe was like Western Europe: a stable and mature market. The market reacted accordingly. But the declaration was not, and is not, true. The vast sums that Central European banks have loaned Eastern Europe are unlikely to be repaid in full, if at all.

In just the same way, the Euro was a European seal of approval for Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. With these countries now in economic collapse, and political meltdown on the way, it is clear that the European pursuit of political ends through economic means has been a disastrous failure. Europe’s basic failure has been to accept its own argument that history came to an end with the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the rise of a united Europe, and that, with the ending of history, economic realities could simply be ignored for the sake of the political aim of an ever-closer Europe. Having been built on the assumption that the good times would never end, Europe is proving itself unwilling to accept that its assumptions, and the European institutions themselves, are now irrelevant.

That is the basic reason why France and Germany have been so assiduous in blaming the U.S. for the crisis: it is a way of denying that their own model was profoundly unstable. Of course, Europe’s problems are not limited to the self-inflicted wounds of integration. Europe, like the U.S., had a property bubble. U.S. banks over-extended themselves: European banks are even more highly leveraged. Former economic leaders like Ireland and Britain used the boom to inflate public payrolls at a spectacular rate, with a resulting loss of economic competitiveness. And, like the U.S., Europe faces a tidal wave of entitlement spending that will make the costs of dealing with the financial crisis appear minuscule by comparison. Unless Europe confronts these realities, no American recovery plan, be it sensible or not, will ultimately be effective.

As of this moment, Europe is not confronting reality. In fact, much like the United States, it is doubling down on failure. While the U.S. tries to spend itself out of debt, Europe is trying to regulate its way back to growth. The basic problem Europe has faced over the past two decades is that its high-tax and high-regulation model is a low-growth one. Its solution now is not to change the model: it is to try to use the crisis to force everyone else in the world to adopt it. That would impose massive costs on its competitors, and so make Europe a more attractive destination for investments.

That is also why Europe is so eagerly pursuing attacks on so-called tax havens, and on hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the crisis, but both are conduits for money fleeing Europe. Closing off those conduits would make Europe’s life easier, even if it did little to end the crisis and nothing to help growth.

Global financial crises, as in 1929, do not happen when the world economy is well-balanced. When they occur, there’s no reason to assume that every past policy was in error. But it’s curious, and depressing, that all the leading countries are simply returning to what has become their stock solution: the U.S. wants to borrow and spend, the Europeans want to regulate, and the Chinese want to sit back and criticize.

The G-20 summit must, it will be argued, be a success: the consequences of perceived failure are too high. But to make it a success, the world’s leaders will have to give a little something to everyone: a nod to spending for Obama, a glance at IMF reform for China, and generalities about global governance for Europe. All of those priorities are misplaced and dangerous. If the world’s leaders want a genuinely successful summit, they will have to start by confronting their own illusions about what made the summit necessary in the first place.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.