Disentangling the U.S. From Its Despotic Clients

The U.S. should at a minimum refrain from being the despots’ accomplice and weapons dealer.

The Economist editors seem to have missed the point of their own reporting:

The best way for Western leaders to avoid charges of hypocrisy is to refrain from staking out moral positions they cannot sustain.

This is certainly one way to avoid charges of hypocrisy, because it amounts to abandoning any pretense of holding principled positions at all. It is true that candidates shouldn’t make promises that they aren’t going to keep, and governments shouldn’t make threats that they are unwilling to back up. If you are unwilling to draw a line anywhere regarding the conduct of client states, you have admitted that you are fine with aiding and abetting whatever crimes those clients commit with your support. The best way to avoid charges of hypocrisy is to avoid entanglements with authoritarian states that lead to our government supporting and protecting torturers and war criminals. If the U.S. isn’t going to hold these states accountable for their outrages (and obviously it isn’t), the very least that it can do is to stop providing them with the means to commit them and the diplomatic and political cover to shield them from scrutiny. In short, the U.S. should at a minimum refrain from being the despots’ accomplice and weapons dealer.