Mi casa no es su casa

Just catching up here on a couple of things I'd wanted to blog about. This is several days old:

Kenya warned by U.S. over Cabinet row

(CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged Kenya's government and opposition party to agree on the composition of their coalition Cabinet after the two sides suspended talks on power-sharing.

"Should the accord not be implemented, however, the United States will form its own judgments regarding responsibility for lack of implementation of the accord, and act accordingly."

Am I reading this correctly? Is the US threatening another sovereign country over an internal political matter? Can you imagine if China or Russia had made such ominous statements during America's last electoral crisis in 2000? What howls of outrage there would have been, and rightly so. America's moments of internal political turmoil are America's business, and no one else's. So should the same standard not apply to other nations? If Kenyan politicians want to haggle over the composition of the cabinet, is that not their own concern?

I know that I'm being slightly obtuse here, in that the US seems to merely be seeking to help stabilize Kenya in the wake of the post-election violence. That's a fine, laudable, and even noble thing. In what remains a mostly uni-polar world, perhaps the lone superpower needs to be able to push other nations in the right direction, on occasion. What bothers me is the (what spin-meisters refer to as) 'optics' of the situation. This is rather indelicate diplomacy -- unfortunately a hallmark of the Bush II administration.

If the US is, at times, resented by people in other countries, look no further than this sort of exceptionalism for an explanation. America would never stand for overt foreign meddling in its political affairs, or intrusions on its borders. For that matter, the US would not look kindly on, say, overt Russian meddling in the Ukraine's internal politics. However, the American government doesn't seem to apply the same standard to itself when it unilaterally sends drones flying into Pakistan or Yemen to fire missiles at its enemies, or threaten Kenyans to form a cabinet. America's sovereignty is sacrosanct. Others' -- not so much.

Can you imagine what would happen if China sent a drone to the coast of California to shoot a missile at Richard Gere?