International Law and the American National Interest

There are those, John Bolton and Paul Stephan among them, who worry that international law poses something of a threat to the US national interest. They argue that the United States should disengage from international law and international institutions, that to the degree the United States involves itself in foreign affairs, it should favor unilateral over multilateral action. To others, this concern seems misplaced: what does the sole superpower have to fear from international law? Moreover, the response continues, even if international law is not directly beneficial to the United States, it is dearly beneficial to at least some other countries. Therefore, the non-threatened and magnanimous superpower should support the creation of an effective international legal system that would enable others to cooperate, develop, and prosper. These two positions, which might be characterized as the realist position and the idealist position, are both flawed. International law is in fact very much in the US national interest. For the United States, engagement with international law and international institutions offers a stability in international politics-and therefore security-that could never be achieved through isolationism and unilateralism

When US scholars speak of sovereignty, what do they mean?

This article examines American conceptions of sovereignty — as they appear in the writings of US scholars of international law, and those US international relations scholars who deal with international law. At first glance, the US literature is dominated by two distinct conceptions of sovereignty: 1. A statist conception that privileges the territorial integrity and political independence of governments regardless of their democratic or undemocratic character; 2. A popular conception that privileges the rights of peoples rather than governments, especially when widespread human rights violations are committed by a totalitarian regime. However, on closer examination, the two conceptions are in fact different manifestations of a single, uniquely American conception of sovereignty - one which elevates the United States above other countries and seeks to protect it against outside influences while, concurrently, maximizing its ability to intervene overseas. The single conception of sovereignty is able to encompass both statist and popular sub-conceptions because the latter have different - though not mutually exclusive - agendas. The statist conception is concerned with protecting the United States against outside influences and has little to say about the sovereignty of other countries. The popular conception is concerned with limiting the sovereignty of other countries and has little to say about the sovereignty of the United States. This article exposes the single US conception of sovereignty - as it exists in the academic literature of international law and international relations — and arrives at some tentative conclusions derived from the unique position and history of the world’s most powerful state. --

Simple Load Balancing for Distributed Hash Tables

Distributed hash tables have recently become a useful building block for a variety of distributed applications. However, current schemes based upon consistent hashing require both considerable implementation complexity and substantial storage overhead to achieve desired load balancing goals. We argue in this paper that these goals can b e achieved more simply and more cost-effectively. First, we suggest the direct application of the "power of two choices" paradigm, whereby an item is stored at the less loaded of two (or more) random alternatives. We then consider how associating a small constant number of hash values with a key can naturally b e extended to support other load balancing methods, including load-stealing or load-shedding schemes, as well as providing natural fault-tolerance mechanisms

Fast Approximate Reconciliation of Set Differences

We present new, simple, efficient data structures for approximate reconciliation of set differences, a useful standalone primitive for peer-to-peer networks and a natural subroutine in methods for exact reconciliation. In the approximate reconciliation problem, peers A and B respectively have subsets of elements SA and SB of a large universe U. Peer A wishes to send a short message M to peer B with the goal that B should use M to determine as many elements in the set SB–SA as possible. To avoid the expense of round trip communication times, we focus on the situation where a single message M is sent. We motivate the performance tradeoffs between message size, accuracy and computation time for this problem with a straightforward approach using Bloom filters. We then introduce approximation reconciliation trees, a more computationally efficient solution that combines techniques from Patricia tries, Merkle trees, and Bloom filters. We present an analysis of approximation reconciliation trees and provide experimental results comparing the various methods proposed for approximate reconciliation.National Science Foundation (ANI-0093296, ANI-9986397, CCR-0118701, CCR-0121154); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowshi