“My boy is wicked smart!”

In this latest Thinking East piece, Nathan sums up the arguments against leftist Craig Murray’s challenge to Foreign Secretary Jack Frost in the upcoming British elections, but he’s telling a bigger story. Scratch the surface and you see a gripping account of why engagement with nasty regimes is sometimes the only way to make positive change. Idealists and liberal utopians might argue to the contrary but that’s often the only way you can change things for the better. The juicy bits are summed up and abridged below by yours truly.

Unlike so many of Murray’s adorers, I’ve seen a slice of that grim human landscape. Uzbekistan transformed me. The world is a nasty, brutal place. I firmly believe that Uzbeks deserve all the rights, freedoms, and opportunities that those of us in the West enjoy. Wishing it to be won’t make it so. Engagement, as unseemly as it may be, is the only option available to those who want a realistic shot at addressing torture in Uzbekistan.

Murray’s Uzbekistan strategy, inasmuch as he has one, has been to walk the “may our souls be pure” path. It sounds perfectly dandy on its own. However, as is often the case in this world, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Let me re-phrase: moral posturing may be good for one’s soul, but it doesn’t make a dictator change his tune; engagement produces results.

If you intend to base your vote on a moral foreign policy, keep in mind that morality is about ends and means. Murray’s way, the antagonist’s route, may leave Britain as innocent as a lamb, but it will certainly destroy the ability of your government to make positive changes in the Uzbek government. But if you want revenge on your government, then by all means, put this man-child in office. Just know though that in the real world, compromises sometimes must be made, and Murray’s unwillingness to compromise will leave the world a colder place.

And as Mr. Robert D. Kaplan recently noted:

The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence.