President Obama is right

Americans can’s sue a sovereign nation.  Not the Vatican.  Not Saudi Arabia.  To imagine otherwise is either to suppose that America has some sort of authority over all other nations or to partake in the liberal drive to eliminate politics and the the responsibility of political authorities with impersonal procedure (that is, with authority hidden and irresponsible).  The judiciary is still part of the government, and legal rulings are acts of some government’s authority, not of some sort of disembodied Voice of Justice.  If one nation has a grievance against another, it may pursue it through the arts of diplomacy and warfare, if it decides that its desired satisfaction is attainable and worth the cost.  President Obama agrees with former President Bush that antagonizing Saudi Arabia doesn’t serve the country’s common good.  This may or may not be true, but it is at least an answer to the right question.

One Response

  1. Very true. The move is entirely symbolic and puts forward a stupid notion in and of itself. The Saudis laugh all the way to the bank.

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