We Are Not Alone: Ambassador to-Be to London Louis Susman, Another Obama Bagman Extraordinaire

And the British media “are in a tizzy”.

I’ve been reading and hearing from a variety of sources that the Japanese authorities were not pleased to hear that a last-minute switch resulted in Jon Roos’ secondment to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, so I’m happy for the peace of mind of those people to know that we are not the only ones who have been pissed off. What’s a little weird is the fact that Susman’s name has already been in the hat for months. Didn’t that give the British enough time to get over it?

Beyond the surprise element—no one wants to be blindsided—what a government official that I talked to said made the most sense to me. He agreed that the Roos nomination was a sign of U.S. satisfaction with Japan as a trusted ally and that it was not unreasonable to assume that Japan should be happy that Tokyo is seen as a posh reward on a par with London, Paris, and Rome. However, the Japanese side is not as happy with the U.S. treatment of Japanese concerns, most notably the abduction issue—thus, in his view, the dissatisfaction with what was being seen in some quarters as a manifestation of benign neglect. We agreed that it was likely that the Japanese side would eventually be happy that an ambassador with real leverage with the President and his staff—after all, Schieffer is just a friend, and Nye is just an academic—would be in town.

I've Been Reading Some European History Lately, and It's Hard to Escape the Impression that Multination States and Popular Rule Are Not a Good Fit

Look at this story on Belgium about what looks like another step towards partition.

From what little I've read about modern European history - only recently – it looks like much of the post WW II stability in the region owes itself to massive relocation/ethnic cleansing, a sorting out (and in at least the case of Jews attempted liquidation) of the different peoples, accompanied by some redrawing of national borders. Where those things did not happen, there has tended to be violence.

In Belgium, where the different peoples already lived apart, they managed to co-exist in a largely, increasingly autonomous relationship. But like a long-separated couple, the Flemish and the Walloons seem to be moving inexorably towards divorce. And the issue, as it so often does in such cases, boils down to money. That is not so, when there has been a lot of domestic violence and mental cruelty along the way and there is no viable supranational body like the EU to precondition states to diminished sovereignty.

More generally, popular vote tends not to work when there is a clear split in communal identities. I suspect that this is old hat to political scientists, but, late to the game, it's something that I've only come to realize by way of the disaster that is Iraq. And the Bush administration too late, unless even now...