Charles Hill, billed at Politico as “a diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale University,” is not a dude I’ve ever heard of before, but I’m guessing he thinks he deserves a better job, because he’s written shabby, underhanded political diatribe thoughtful piece for Politico Magazine titled “Why Political Islam Is Winning,” in which he waxes philosophical over the decline of the spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia, among other things, coming up with a number of whoppers that provoked my ire, including the following:
“And the recent American message to the world that the United States will be comfortable stepping back from world leadership in order to do “nation-building at home”—one of President Barack Obama’s favorite phrases—has left the international system not only leaderless but also rudderless. In the rhetoric of the corridors of the Kremlin and the pages of strategic journals in Beijing, the line has emerged that the international state system that may be traced back to 1648, and has been coextensive with the modern era itself, is coming to an end. Russia and China have been moving, sometimes brutally, sometimes step by step, to prepare for the new world order to come, which will be a world of big powers without the constraints of universality that the modern system assumed; in short, we are still in a paradigm whose time seems to be going, but we don’t seem to know it or don’t much care.”
Pardon me, but that is so much bullshit. Does Dr. Hill (I guess he’s a doctor) want to go back to the good old days of George W., when, supposedly, the U.S. was “leading” the world? Does he really think that the invasion of Iraq represented “leadership”? I’m not much taken with the good doctor’s huffing and puffing regarding the Treaty of Westphalia, which dates from 1648 and supposedly established the “principle” that the international order was based on discrete sovereign states who did not attempt to conquer one another or interfere with each other’s internal affairs, a principle not highly regarded by Louis XIV, who kept biting off pieces of the Netherlands and various German principalities, nor by William of Orange, who would have conquered England in 1688 had not the English decided that discretion was the better part of valor and surrendered ahead of time. Come to think of it, the U.S. war of conquest waged against Mexico in 1848, not to mention the Spanish-American War and the subsequent decades of “gunboat diplomacy” in Central America and the Caribbean, weren’t really in keeping with the “Spirit of Westphalia” either.
Today, it’s the U.S. who has been the primary offender against the Treaty of Westphalia, eagerly engaging in “regime change”—a virtual obsession with the Republican Party since Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992, suggesting to the Republicans that if they were going to defeat lotus-eating hippie party they’d better find themselves another cold war.1 Even when we’re not invading countries, we’re trying to teach them how to behave, either directly through sanctions (Iraq and Iran) or indirectly through financial support of a plethora of international do-gooder outfits that exist largely to gratify the vanity of American moralists who have run out of causes here at home.
For Dr. Hill to claim that it’s Russia and China that are tearing up the “Spirit of Westphalia” rather than the U.S. is hilarious. Charlie really wants us to believe that he believes that Russia—poor, pitiful Russia—is moving “brutally” to prepare for some mythical new world order. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see that Russia has done nothing except dig itself into an enormous financial hole from which it will probably not escape in “King” Putin’s lifetime.2 As for China, China is the state that is upholding the “Spirit of Westphalia”: “We don’t care what your domestic policies are. We just want to deal.”
My guess is that Dr. Hill wrote this mess, with all its cheap cracks at the expense of the “intelligentsia” and other offenses,3 because he wants a job in the Jeb Bush administration. That’s the best reason I can think of to vote for Hillary Clinton. In fact, it’s a goddamn good one.
Afterwords
I confess that I kind of forgot about Dr. Hill’s title, “Why Political Islam Is Winning”. That’s because it isn’t.
