What's Wrong With The Henry Jackson Society?

The pursuit of a robust foreign policy was one of Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson’s most central concerns. This was to be based on clear universal principles such as the global promotion of the rule of law, liberal democracy, civil rights, environmental responsibility and the market economy.

The last of these is incompatible with the other four.

The western policies of strength and human rights, which later hastened the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship

It would have collapsed anyway.

Our failures in the former Yugoslavia (especially Bosnia) were more than just moral.

You've got that right! But not in the sense that you mean...

The early interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, although imperfect, provide an appropriate model for future action.

Kosovo is now a Mafia fiefdom, the heroin-smuggling capital of Europe, run on the UN's watch by the blackshirted Wahabbi Nazi-nostalgists of the KLA. Some "model"!

But modernisation and democratisation often does not require a military solution. For example, the European Union has been instrumental in expanding its democratic ‘Grand Area’ on the continent since the fall of the Iron Curtain. So has NATO, through the process of eastern enlargement, and various initiatives engaging the Soviet successor states.

The EU and NATO are anti-democratic, and their expansion is most heartily to be deplored. Don't signatories such as Andrew Roberts, David Trimble, Michael Gove, Michael Ancram, Ed Vaizey and David Willetts believe that?

4. Supports the necessary furtherance of European military modernisation and integration under British leadership, preferably within NATO.

So, "preferably" under overall American command. All you Tories (and others) who signed up, this is what you signed up to: a unified European defence capability under overall American command.

6. Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organisation which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.

Well, that depends what you want any such organisation to do. You could have the UN without, say, China, or indeed Russia, in it. But what would be the point? And are you advocating British withdrawal from the Commonwealth? If not, then (in your own terms) why not?

7. Gives two cheers for capitalism. There are limits to the market, which needs to serve the Democratic Community and should be reconciled to the environment.

It can't, and it can't be. I give no cheers for capitalism, and I ask the three Labour MPs who have signed up to this why they give two, or even one.