Tara McCormack
Guilty fantasies
Moreover, it’s noteworthy that for all his shrewd criticism of the way the left projects its fantasies onto the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bruckner himself was a keen supporter of the break up of Yugoslavia and the punishment and demonisation of Serbia during the 1990s. Bruckner failed utterly to understand that the left (and indeed many on the right such as himself) were projecting a fantasy onto the Yugoslav break up and war.
Humanitarian blues
Given Foley’s identification of the anti-democratic aspects of political humanitarianism, it seems odd that he can then argue that it is actually a positive thing that a court applies international rather than domestic law and is actually insulated from the society over which it presides.
Unreal ethical realism
Whilst Europeans and American liberals are convinced Obama will take a more multilateral and non-interventionist approach, the authors are not so sanguine: there is little difference between Republican neoconservatives and Democrat liberal hawks who will be influential in any Democrat administration.
The domestic limits to American international leadership after Bush
What both Republicans and Democrats fail to grasp is that international legitimacy of the kind that caused the West to accept American leadership after World War Two must derive, ultimately, from domestic politics. International legitimacy cannot be restored solely through actions in the international sphere.
Back to the future?
Kagan fails to engage with the world as it is today, preferring instead to go back to the future and to imagine that the template of 19th century Europe or the Cold War can be a guide for today
Obfuscating accountability
On the same night that the House of Commons debated the Conservative Party’s amendment to the bill that will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, Intelligence Squared held its own debate on the question of whether Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty.
‘Just’ a good storyteller
In her own time, Du Maurier was often dismissed as a romantic novelist, an author who wrote mainly for a female, popular audience, with her mix of mystery, romance and suspense. In fact there is little to be compared to the pure pleasure and escapism that comes from reading a really good novel.
