Onward to the 18th Century!

I want to know what this means:

Although the Bush administration objected to the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the president wrote a memorandum ordering the state courts to comply.

He said the ICJ's decision must be carried out because the US had agreed to abide by the court's rulings in such cases.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the ICJ's decision could not be forced upon the states.

The president may not "establish binding rules of decision that pre-empt contrary state law", Mr Roberts wrote.

Politically, it's a potential PR boost for Bush - he tried, he really really tried! - but for once I'm not concerned about that.

I'm concerned that it seems like the Supreme Court just ruled that international agreements signed by U.S. rank lower than.... the will of individual states?

Really?

Really?

I must be missing something. It sounds like Roberts just introduced one hell of a doctrine of states' rights.

Any attorneys (past, present or future) out there want to comment? Please?

h/t CA.

[Hegemony] The U.S.'s Slow-Motion Swan Dive

From the New York Times, some good Sunday reading:

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

I've been predicting a long, slow decline in US power along these lines for some time. Parag Khanna, the author, doesn't get at resource scarcity (which makes US military interventions more likely, which could change the equation), but I think Khanna is essentially correct: The US is a lumbering behemoth in the slow, painful process of crashing to the ground due to its own ignorance. (The epistemology of the Master-Slave dialectic seems ripe for application here.)

The only thing that prevents me from saying "it's about time" is the prospect that the US won't go quietly, and instead we're going to see lots more Iraq-style resource appropriation adventures/attempts at maintaining control in the near- to medium-future. You know, the kind that cause hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians to be killed or displaced. Blech.

Another Dose of Digby

She is - perhaps by far - the smartest political analyst in the liberal blogosphere for my money. In the last several years, I've basically never seen her make a mistake. Hell, at this point I don't know if she even has critics, and all the big names in the liberal blogosphere have critics. Anyway, this struck my eye:

Hey, you can't really blame people overseas for thinking this way. I doubt that anyone overseas has been any more impressed with their commitment to democracy than I have since they launched it directly after stealing an election at home and telling everyone who raised the slightest protest to go cheney themselves. There may be people in the world less credible on the issue of democracy, but I can't think of any who have made such a fetish of insisting that other countries do as they say but not as they do.

Furthermore, the Bush administration has such a reputation for lying and incompetence, the smart bet is to do exactly the opposite of what they prescribe in any situation. You can't go wrong assuming that if they want something it's for self-serving reasons and that if they get what they want, they will screw it up so badly that even if it were well-intentioned it would come out badly anyway.

...

This is going to be a big problem for the US for a long time to come. People may recognize that Bush and Cheney are somewhat unique cases, but they also know that the bipartisan political establishment pretty much backed everything he did. It makes it very hard to argue that anyone else will be substantially different.

...

No matter what a new administration does, the single most important rhetorical tool they must employ is Bush bashing. And I mean that seriously. Our credibility around the world is moribund until the US government repudiates George W. Cheney.

There's a radicalness to her critique of the U.S. political system in there, and that radical critique - which is of the structural (as opposed to people-based) nature of the problems in Washington, D.C. - didn't really exist in the mainstream before the liberal blogosphere came along.

The big liberal bloggers and their hordes of commenters, co-bloggers and readers want to love America so bad, but the more they've learned, the more they - as an overly broad generalization - realize how deep and nasty the structural problems are.

It's enough to make my cynical black heart laugh.