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This says nothing about being a member in good standing, or about abiding by law. It does spell out the basic attitude towards the community of nations, and about international law.

You could say that the US is not in good standing is, for instance, it did not pay its membership dues to the UN (oops), or if it had disregarded unfavourable rulings by the World Court (oops), or if it had carried out wars of aggression after seeking and failing to obtain Security Council authorisation (oops)...

The basic attitudes spelled out in the quoted paragraphs are: US law is above international law. Within the conceptual metaphor of "the community of nations", this attitude is asocial [in a libertarian individualistic kind of way], maybe anomic or even sociopathic. This still does not say anything about how "well adjusted" this asocial individual is. I would say that after 9/11 it's clearly become maladjusted.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed May 31st, 2006 at 08:19:26 AM EST
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