Derb: I didn’t mean to suggest that all the free-Tibet activism was trendiness, but I don’t think there’s a chic “fringe” — the chic-ness the whole reason it’s front-burner issue. Type “Free Tibet” into Google and you get 1.4 million hits; “Free Kurdistan” returns just 23,000. How many “Free East Turkestan” bumper stickers do you see on Volvos in Cambridge? Or “Free Ukraine” messages on college students’ backpacks during the Cold War? Or protests in San Francisco over the Jim Crow status of Christians in the Middle East? It’s the same trendiness that focuses on Darfur, while millions died in Congo, or calls for divestment from Burma but reconciliation with Vietnam.

Actually, maybe the lefty-ness isn’t the issue, as much as trendiness in general. Americans, in particular, are prone to these kind of foreign-policy enthusiasms, dating back to sympathy for the French Revolution and the Greek War of Independence, and Kossuth’s Hungarian Revolution. This is one of the main reasons I’m a foreign-policy minimalist — America’s foreign policy is more heavily influenced by public opinion than most places, but America’s national character is uniquely unsuited to the stable execution of an activist foreign policy.

I wish the Tibetans well in their fight to reclaim their country (and the Kurds too and, heck, even the Uighurs), but it has little bearing on the safety and prosperity of our country.