More Isocratic business, I'm afraid. I do end with a proposal though. This time, your correspondent is responding to a heartfelt call for morally inspired foreign policy. My response is below.

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I'm afraid I am an unapologetic member of a different club; if you recall, our time-honored clubs played a rather droll game of cricket one sunny afternoon in the Mediterranean -- history likes to call that little encounter by the name Thucydides gave it: the Melian Dialogue. My club was in vogue in the nineteenth century; yours, the twentieth.

But the objections of the Realist School aside, I'd like to point out an inherent contradiction in your thoughts.

You begin indignantly: "Is this not a worrying notion? Working from the quotation, requiring a citizen to "repair to the standard of his country whenever it was reared..." Does this not sound to you like a death-wish to very many nations? Imagine any proactive action, such as the liberation of Darfur from the murdering extremists who control it, undertaken by such a nation. The elected officials of a nation decide that it is time to intervene, and the populace draws lots and marches off to war... does this not abridge the freedoms of the individual?"

You end filled with righteous energy: "These are not men who wish to be reasoned with, and diplomatic overtures to such men seem like madness where I'm sitting. Ought we not say that those nations with the power to free other human beings from bondage are all but morally bound to do so?"

There is a contradiction here. Your first contention is a liberal one; you argue, rightly, that leaders oughtn't translate their personal moral code into foreign policy, dragging their constituents (who may individually have different moral beliefs) into it. You end defending those very leaders, arguing that they must be craft a national foreign policy to reflect their pangs of conscience. There is no way to resolve the two.

I am compelled to end with the same question you posed at the beginning of your argument: "Are we not thusly voluntarily suborning ourselves to the whim of our elected officials, putting our lives on the line in the process?"

Yes, I believe we would be. The problem with foreign policies founded on moral indignation is that most situations are rarely as simple as the Holocuast, Darfur, or Rwanda. Should Tibet be invaded and the Chinese government overthrown? Should the Australian government be toppled and the land restored to the Aboriginal people? Should Washington be dismantled, and the Native Americans be given back their sprawling fields? As you said we are "risking any politician having hold of a population that the law forces to fight in conflicts that may be against their will."

And on the other hand, we too often hid behind the standard of Realism and its motto (put simply, "Things Are More Complicated Than You Think") to justify inaction. If Hitler did not conquer any land and simply exterminated the Jewish race, I doubt the Realist School would have lifted a finger, much less choke on their morning coffee. In response to your question: no, I do not believe we are always bound to free other humans from bondage nor to pre-emptively prevent tyrants from assuming power. But we are bound to prevent the extermination of innocent people. The difference is that the former would mean we should invade Venezuela and Singapore; the latter would impel us to intervene in Darfur.

If I began bitingly, I apologize. I take the Nietzschean view of things when I have to be harsh: best to get it over with all at once and quickly, rather than slowly and drawn out. You make a compelling case for the creation of an international police force that would intervene to prevent gross human rights violations. But rare is the case of human rights abuse so simple that good and evil are plain to see; far more often are cases like Tibet or Palestine where both sides have, at some point or another, lost their moral high ground.
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While we're referencing history, we might as well list the Praetorian Guard as a guard force that overstepped its charter. An international force could, perhaps, answer to The Hague; the force would not be used for invasion or occupation, but as high class kidnappers. As a tool of the Hague, it's paramilitary arm would be responsible for the extradition of criminals to the Court for prosecution. It's military arm would, as I argued at Isocracy, step in to defend the lives of innocent people in a gross human rights violation case as determined by the judges at the Hague. The judges already deliberate on what constitutes gross human rights violations; this merely gives them teeth.

Just as Germany's version of the Supreme Court is a political force, so too should the ICC at the Hague.