It Isn’t Your Country I’m Not Into, It’s You

Freddy Gray posts an @TAC on the way at least one glaring example of foreign policy hackery is sure to transcend the mere Bush era:

Very interesting and revealing post from Gideon Rachman about a lunch with Georgia’s President “Misha” Saakashvili […]:

John McCain is also a personal friend – “the guy brought me a bulletproof vest in 2003, specially came in with a bulletproof vest to give it to me.” […] Saakashvili points out that Barack Obama was one of two co-sponsors of a recent Senate resolution in favour of Georgia joining Nato. And Richard Holbrooke, tipped to be secretary of state in a putative Clinton administration, is “a good friend for a long time, a real genius”.

One school of thought would hold that globocronyism clientelism based on close personal relationships is worth the price of asserting and advancing our interests abroad. A rival school would answer that our interests abroad are sure to be distorted and captured by foreign policies anchored by a weighted net of cozy, facile relationships with a single, powerful leader. Especially when one of our interests abroad is supposed to be the promotion of representative democracy.

My real concern is that certain American-educated foreigners develop a sense of bulletproof insider entitlement and a voluptuous ego to match which, when they return home to run their country, infects local politics and leads straight to petty despotism. So perhaps this post should be titled, in the geopolitical scheme of things, “It’s Not You, It’s Me” — but still be about a breakup that still ought to happen. Trouble is, Saakashvili is a psycho ex waiting to happen.