Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama’s crater-faced ex-dictator, may or may not wind up in a gringo calaboose for the rest of his life. After the first blush of the US victory over Gen. Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Force began to wear a bit gray, legal authorities in the United States suddenly realized they might not have much of a case against the caudillo after all. Nevertheless, the general’s trial could set a precedent for the globalization of US law enforcement and ultimately endanger American national sovereignty as well as the rights and security of American citizens against other countries’ policemen.

Last summer there surfaced in the nation’s press reports word of a secret Justice Department memorandum that argued the case for the legality of US law enforcement agencies fetching home fugitives, even if they’ve gone to ground on foreign shores. “Fugitives” means not only American criminals who have fled abroad but also foreign nationals who aren’t American citizens and who didn’t commit their offenses on US territory. Like, for example, a money launderer in Luxembourg who violates US tax and reporting statutes. Or like Gen. Noriega and his colleagues in the multinational corporations that constitute the Latin American drug cartel.

The memorandum remains secret to this day, but Justice Department spokesman David Runkel confirmed to the press that the ruling acknowledges the President’s authority to order the FBI to seize fugitives abroad without the consent of the government sheltering the crooks. President Bush denied knowing anything about the memorandum, and Secretary of State James Baker and all the munchkins of Foggy Bottom began to back away from what Justice was proposing.

Mr. Baker said that the Justice proposal “did not take into consideration, as I understand it, international law nor the President’s constitutional responsibility to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.” In other words, America’s cooky-pusher-in-chief doesn’t want the legal hounds down at Justice barking at him and his fellow munchkins about how to take care of the world. That’s understandable, at least from State’s perspective. But the Department’s legal adviser Abraham Sofaer had already expressed some more salient objections to Justice’s newfound powers.

Testifying in 1985 before a Senate subcommittee, Mr. Sofaer noted that “seizure by US agents of terrorist suspects abroad might constitute a serious breach of the territorial sovereignty of a foreign state and could violate local kidnapping laws.” Further, he warned, “How would we feel if some foreign nation . . . came over here and seized some terrorist suspect . . . because we refused . . . to extradite that individual?”

A memorandum of the State Department’s Office of Legal Policy, written with regard to the possible seizure of fugitive Robert Vesco (supposedly in Cuba), reached conclusions directly opposed to those of last summer’s Justice paper. “US agents,” State’s memo argued, “have no law enforcement authority in another nation unless it is the product of that nation’s consent,” and arrests by American lawmen on foreign soil without the government’s permission are “regarded as an impermissible invasion of the territorial integrity of another state.”

But whatever the legal flaws of the Justice Department position and whatever back-dancing State and the White House may have performed last summer, by December the Justice concept of globe-trotting G-men had become one of the main arguments Mr. Bush was deploying to justify the expedition against Gen. Noriega. The Panama shooting party was not complete until the general was dragged back to the United States like a conquered barbarian king marching in a Roman triumph. So far we don’t know whether, like Julius Caesar’s foe, Gallic king Vercingetorix, he will be strangled in a cellar when his captors have no more use for him.

But what we can predict, as lawyer Sofaer suggested in 1985, is that once the United States publicly asserts the right to dispatch policemen into foreign countries without the permission of their governments, those countries can just as easily send their own cops here. If American religious groups smuggle Bibles into Cuba, for instance, why can’t Mr. Castro send agents into the United States, without permission from Washington or the states, to round up the American culprits who insult the majesty of Cuba libre’s own laws? There’s no reason, and there’s nothing Washington could do to stop them short of physically throwing them out if it can catch them.

About a month before Mr. Bush’s muscle-flexing in Panama, liberal Democratic Congressman Don Edwards raised this point to Assistant Attorney General William P. Barr, author of the secret departmental memorandum. “How can we expect other nations to respect our laws if we don’t respect theirs?” Mr. Edwards asked. Mr. Barr’s rather flaccid response was to say, “I reject any notion of moral equivalency between the United States and outlaw countries.” Maybe so, but the point is (a) “outlaw countries” (whatever they are) don’t reject such equivalency, and (b) under the Justice Department doctrine, not only pariah states like Cuba but also any foreign government—that of France, Great Britain, Canada, Mexico—has just as much right to play Dick Tracy within our borders as we do within theirs. The legal, diplomatic, and political implications for the safety of law-abiding US citizens, who may or may not feel like obeying foreign laws to which they have never consented, are frightening.

One practical test of the effective sovereignty of a government is its ability to enforce law within its own territory. If the United States claims the power to enforce its laws in other countries’ territories, it comes dangerously close to asserting sovereignty over them. The old-fashioned word for that is “imperialism,” but today’s empires are marching under the label of “globalism,” whether economic, political, or cultural.

The globalization of law enforcement that the Justice Department has rationalized and that the Bush administration has at least implicitly adopted by putting Gen. Noriega in the dock is simply the most recent instance of the continuing globalist effort to transcend national sovereignty and identity and diminish the very concept of nationality. When nationality and its institutions have been sufficiently worn away, Americans may find that playing global policeman affords them far less security than just minding their own business.