America and Ideals

Yesterday I had a good discussion with a friend in Paris. We talk quarterly. He operates at a pretty senior level so he has a pretty broad and well-informed perspective on a lot of things.

We were discussing Ukraine and he told me that he had been at a lunch where a relatively conservative French guy had spoken and argued that NATO was making a mistake in pushing Russia into the arms of China over a relatively inconsequential country. Better that we should sit down with Putin, give him the Donbas and Odessa and provide substantial support and real guarantees to the rest of Ukraine. 

Putting aside the specific merits of the argument, I took umbrage at the cold realpolitik of this approach. We cannot, I maintained, entirely divorce our foreign policy -- indeed all of our policy -- from the ideals of freedom, democracy, and rule of law. America must always strive to be principles-based at some level. We will never be pure, we will never attain the ideal. We will always stumble at best -- often we fail miserably and are rightly called out by the press and the academy for our failures. Our specific actions will always be leavened with calculation, but we must try. We cannot ask people to go and risk their lives in foreign lands in service of nothing but our interests and hegemony. If that's all it's about, we might as well just leave and go someplace where things are easier and better, if we could find that place.