> I'm getting thoroughly fed up with analyses of geopolitics that begin and end with talks of rights and justifications. No doubt. It’s a challenging frame for

> I'm getting thoroughly fed up with analyses of geopolitics that begin and end with talks of rights and justifications. No doubt. It’s a challenging frame for a discourse. Part of the challenge might be related to the fact that it sometimes completely dismantles other arguments that are willing to ignore human rights as enshrined in the U.S. constitution? If we don’t live up to those goals and indeed if they aren’t shared goals, we might need to rethink the entire American government. Personally, those are still very important goals for me and I am glad to see that elected officials try to use soft power to spread idealistic, but basic human rights. The right to self determination is important, as is the right to vote (e.g.: without party membership such as in a one party state). You’re using your free speech rights on this social media website to argue that someone who is an elected representative shouldn’t exercise her rights. This is perplexing but also understandable. > It's just the wrong framework to analyze international relations if your goal is to predict behavior at the scale of nation-states and maximize ones own interests. My sense is that we need more than one framework, I also think game theory and expected value analysis is also probably useful here. However I don’t think we agree about the notion of self interest. The world is slipping, perhaps running, into authoritarian rule in several areas. If we do not hold the line, and in fact try to expand it peacefully through, we will find it shrinks for us as well. Probably in the short term, the damage to the economy if Taiwan was unavailable for semiconductor manufacturing would probably seriously harm us in an economically measurable manner. In this way, human rights, the economy, and game theory all seem like reasonable frames for discourse - the balance of the results is then a political question. That political question is best answered with democracy. It’s not perfect, it seems unclear what is better though. > Of course she has a legal right to travel to Taiwan as a US citizen. Thanks for conceding that as it was unclear - when you said “Nancy Pelosi wasn't elected to engage in foreign policy” I was unsure. That’s the reason several persons I know voted for her (I know; the plural of anecdote isn’t data…), I didn’t but hey, how can we evaluate that statement except by a legal or rights based analysis? In terms of power delegated to her, it’s certainly part of the job. If not, there is a specific legal process to impeach her. Personally I think she should probably be impeached for insider trading but that’s also because it looks clearly like corruption, and that really harms American interests in a measured way.