Not all that long ago, revelations about an American president’s shady financial entanglements with an Indonesian businessman would have stirred up a debate about more than campaign finance. During the Cold War, liberal Democrats and left-wing activists would have made a big fuss over the administration’s increasingly cozy relationship with the corrupt, thirty-year- old authoritarian dictatorship of President Suharto. And conservative Republicans would have responded, a la Jeane Kirkpatrick, that the liberals were hypocrites with a “double standard,” favoring warmer ties with anti- American Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Vietnam, and China, but not with ” friendly” dictators like Suharto.

But these days there are no more double standards about dictatorships. If they’re big “emerging markets” for American exports, we love them all. Republicans nowadays welcome closer trading ties with Communist tyrannies in China and Vietnam. If conservatives once decried the (liberal) idea that trading with the Soviets or Cubans would lead to political reforms, today they find such notions unusually persuasive, especially when it means big Chinese contracts for Boeing and General Electric. Democrats, meanwhile, make no complaint about their president’s chumminess with the Suhartos of this world. True, twenty years ago liberals condemned such relationships when they were justified on the grounds of antiCommunist containment. But today they find them perfectly justifiable if they mean more jobs for American workers.