Andy, one pedantic correction to your fine post about Bermuda, a place I love. You describe it as a “country.” It’s not. It’s a colony, or “overseas dependent territory,” as the imperially squeamish Brits now prefer to say. It has an elected government and one of the oldest parliaments in the world, but it does not enjoy state-to-state relations. There is no U.S. ambassador in Bermuda or vice-versa. As you say, London remains responsible for foreign affairs and defense. It is a sub-national jurisdiction. What Obama has done is roughly analagous to, say, Hugo Chávez negotiating directly with St. Thomas or Vermont to take a bunch of unwanted troublemakers.

It solves a problem for the president in a kind of Manilow Doctrine way (“Bermuda Triangulation/It makes people disappear”). But it’s weird and inappropriate, and had a Republican president done it to one of “our European allies” it would be regarded as swaggering arrogant cowboy stuff.