I find ww’s remarks (haven’t given up on double-dubya, just takes too long to type!) on prerequisites for national unity quite interesting. What I like about the ‘non-contiguous constitutionalism’ idea is that it bypasses the whole EU approach and says, here’s a political and economic system that has been working decently well for a few centuries for a very diverse group of people (didn’t we start off the debate with ww saying how good it was that one region–NE–didn’t dominate American decision-making when it came to war? haven’t we been discussing the regional conflicts in American history?), separation of powers, protection of individual liberties, federal/state tugs-of-war, e pluribus unum, etc.–do you want to join in? I wouldn’t have the foggiest as to how to implement the idea, but if it’s a good one, smart people would figure that out. Of course a vote to start the ‘application’ process wouldn’t be an automatic opt-in–was this ever true of any state that joined the Union?

Your Puerto Rico example is well-taken, ww. Another example that the U.S. is not ready to issue such an invitation is the quality of political debate over reforming U.S. immigration policy.

As I understand it, ww’s basic philosophy is that promoting economic, cultural, and civic interactions within and across national borders is the most realistic approach to eventually developing some kind of global political infrastructure that would be seen by most peoples as a legitimate enforcer of the rule of law and hence would minimize possibilities of war. An attempt to jump-start the process, say, through an American invitation to any existing nation-state to apply for entry into the Union, would more likely produce a short-circuit than a viable energy source (to extend the metaphor, painfully). And you say you are a supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq because sometimes you do need to jump-start the process? What was going so horribly wrong that an invasion was realistically the best option for the U.S. and the world? Were realists in the administration really driving the push for invasion or did they just go along for the ride or were they kicked to the curb? It seems to me the state of post-war planning in the Pentagon lends support to the third or second options rather than the first. Have you seen reviews of Fukuyama’s implicit critique of the Bush administration in his latest book?

On the oil issue, isn’t the point the ‘peak oil’ people are making is that as enegy calculations change over the course of this century, it’s inevitable that geopolitical ones will, too. I don’t find Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy to be totally convincing, but I think his argument that US economic and geopolitical success has a lot to do with our understanding the uses of oil before other countries did interesting and his analysis of energy and the rise and fall of empires provocative. WW suggests that we have been pretty restrained in the past (by which I mean him to mean we’ve preferred covert ops over war) and that Iraq isn’t part of a pattern. Wonder what happens if there are political crises in Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia at the same time….

In response to double-dubya’s “national interests require us to use military action ‘to prevent any hostile power(s) from gaining a stranglehold on world oil supplies'” principle (a bipartisan one, I should acknowledge), I would be interested in a more realistic application to Iraq, one that gets into some of the worm cans applying it seems to have opened.

One, by getting our troops out of Saudi Arabia (a move I support), the difficulty of securing dependable alternate basing in the region arises (as can be seen even during the initial invasion of Iraq, when we ha the Saudi bases). Everything I’m reading suggests Bush-Cheney expected permanent bases in Iraq to replace those in Saudi Arabia (thereby positioning us to intervene in Saudi Arabia or Iraq if their regimes happened to collapse and something worse took their place). I suspect this is why Republicans haven’t endorsed the key Democratic action item in Iraq (not much for an opposition party, but something): a ‘no permanent bases’ pledge. But even if forced into it by domestic or international politics, the basing issue remains a thorny one.

Two, if Iraq is any example, the trigger for action, a “stranglehold on world oil supplies,” can mean any number of things in practice: 1) a major oil-producing country setting up oil contracts we don’t like (such as those with countries and corporations willing to go around the UN sanctions on Iraq that we promptly voided once we took Baghdad); 2) a major oil-producing country with a weak enough military and no nukes that nationalizes its oil production and shuts out Western oil multinationals; 3) potential threats to supplies, like Hussein could have been if the sanctions were lifted, if he got nukes, if he wanted to risk a wider regional war by pursuing his own annexationist agenda, and if he won it (that’s a lot of ifs). Pretty hair trigger, if you ask me.

Three, the geopolitical realists don’t have an airtight case against the economic realists, who point out that no matter how hostile a power controls the oil, they still have to sell it to someone to profit from it.

But here’s where the jack-in-the-box pops out of the worm cans ( mixing metaphors can be fun)–where the separation between the economic and the political that realists of all stripes seem to depend upon is so hard to maintain. In an earlier comment, double-dubya suggested that “liberal” institutions need first to be built in Iraq before any democratic institutions can realistically be expected to emerge. So in plain language this means that Iraqis need to submit to the kind of free market capitalism that the World Bank and the IMF push (and that maybe someday when the US’s debt levels get high enough we’ll actually have to follow as well)–and that Naomi Klein, William Greider, Tom Englehardt, and others have been calling illegal restructurings by an occupying power–in the hopes that the magic of capitalism will lead to the flowering of democracy (as it has in Singapore and Russia…). Besides this reading of “liberal,” what other liberal (in the political sense of individual protections against government oppression) institutions are we actually helping build right now? Do we need to offer any ‘republican’ ones, as well (based on the idea that the government can act in the common good)?

The reason I’d support a referendum along the lines I laid out sooner rather than later is that we seem to be actually pursuing the second option (“consulting on the road to Iraqi democratic sovereignty”), but with less legitimacy than a popular referendum on our presence and activities would provide, should the vote go that way. And if it doesn’t, it gives us an excellent reason for withdrawal, or, if our political system actually is more appealing than Iran’s or Hamas’s style of leadership to folks in the region, it starts the process for petitioning for U.S. statehood by Kurdish and perhaps even Shiite regions of Iraq. Whatever the outcome, it provides a clear path for future action not dictated by US economic or political elites, but by the Iraqi people themselves.

To me, this is just taking Bush at his most idealistic word (and not Cheney at his most secretive–what was agreed on in that energy policy meeting with the oil execs, really?). But it might be one concrete step we could take that demonstrates Tim’s point that idealism can be realistic in the right circumstances.

I’m wondering what others think of novelists like Card and Robinson who at times seem to be looking for an alternative to the Hobbesian conception of international relations that I see double-dubya relying upon in his arguments with Tim. (No doubt Bush-Cheney also share this Hobbesian viewpoint, which is why I’m trying so hard to establish their links with mid- and late-19th C proponents of American manifest destiny–to show that the their early-21st C version of American manifest destiny becomes the functional equivalent of Hobbes’s divine right of kings in the international realm. Which is how realist prudentialism turns into exceptionalist providentialism, with disastrous consequences when we start to believe our own press releases or confuse spin and reality or argue that wartime presidents gain king-like powers.)

I really do think the Ender series is worth a second look (of course double-dubya hated the ending of Ender’s Game, since it so thoroughly and effectively upends the Heinlein of Starship Troopers, which the rest of the novel had appeared to be siding with, against Haldeman’s The Forever War). Although I don’t hesitate to admit that Card’s uneven (as much as I enjoy the premise of Pastwatch, I think it’s one of his worst novels) and sometimes overly simplistic (as much as I like the attempt to reimagine 19th C America in the Alvin Maker series, there’s too much wish fulfillment in the fantasy for me), I do find his geopolitical turn since Ender’s Shadow (1999) to be quite interesting and perhaps even important. With a focus on conflicts on Earth immediately after the victory over the Buggers, he’s able to take supporting characters from Ender’s Game and turn them into main characters in a future that’s near enough to our present to raise questions about what he’s getting at about our world today. If you follow the developments post-1999 in the series, you’ll see him broaching the non-contiguous constitutionalism idea over time, as an alternative to endless conquest attempts or maintaining a balance-of-power status quo.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s politics are quite different from Card’s but the Mars trilogy raises a similar idea–the first novel, Red Mars is ultimately about a failed revolution and an accidentally successful terraforming project; the second, Green Mars is ultimately about a successful revolution and the evolution of an independent Mars; the third, Blue Mars, is ultimately about what it means to form global governments and colonize the solar system. Of course, you have to get through three big novels to get to the Mars-wide constitutional congress scene, but if you want the cheat sheet check out the short story collection The Martians (1999) 265-280 for a look back at the constitutionalism it took him a couple of thousand pages to develop in the trilogy–just skipping to Blue Mars 111-158 won’t convey either the drama of the many false starts leading up to the formation of a global Martian constitution (detailed in the first two novels of the trilogy) or the drama of how geopolitics on Earth evolves in response to the Martian example and to a global environmental crisis (in the rest of the last novel).

In short, Card and Robinson in these novels (sorry, I haven’t read the ones double-dubya recommends) do seem to be at least flirting with alternate paths toward developing a truly global constitutionalism. Both imagine them coming not out of a Rome-like dominant power but from below, so to speak. And both wrestle with what obstacles would have to be overcome along the way (Robinson more thoughtfully than Card, IMO).

My own twist on this would be for the US to issue an open invitation for any nation to start the process of petitioning Congress for statehood under Article 4 of the Constitution and see what happens. This wouldn’t be territorial annexation, although it makes sense to first extend the offer to states we have a long history of occupying and abandoning (Haiti and the Philippines, for instance, and why not contemporary Iraq?). Or if the U.S.’s tradition of doubting others’ “fitness for self-government” (cf. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color for the racialist and racializing implications of republicanist political theory) makes this unlikely, perhaps some other country would take the lead and push for a non-contiguous constitutional nation that improves on the U.S. model.

Sorry for the apparent digression into political fantasy, but I’m in no shape to engage double-dubya’s #3-#6 and anyway I’m more curious as to what Tim makes of my attempts to suggest that Bush-Cheney were not so much punking the “deep strains of Wilsonian ambition in American culture” so much as resurrecting even deeper destinarian strains and to respond to his idea that “If we ever get beyond the fiasco of the Iraqi conflict (something I increasingly doubt) we shouldn’t just return to multilateralist business as usual, but work out instead some different configurations of international institutions and the assumptions that undergird their activities.”