USS Clueless defends American unilateralism again:
[quoting a British paper] “a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration’s hands”. We in the US refer to that as “liberty”. I know it’s a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we’d like to keep it. We think it’s pretty damned important.
No, that’s sovereignty, not the same thing at all; though Steve is right in saying our ancestors fought a war for it (when they already had considerable liberty). Liberty, on the other hand, is defended precisely by tying the administration’s hands – or so Americans once used to say.
(While I’m up, democracy is also not the same thing as either liberty or sovereignty.)