When it comes to the United States and our allies, one of the great failures of American foreign policy since the end of World War II is this bizarre idea in the United States that if our allies are imperfect, it somehow makes sense to abandon them.
This is what we did in Vietnam. Our allies were imperfect, so we abandoned them, and then the Viet Cong took over. The same thing happened in Afghanistan, where our allies were seriously imperfect. And by imperfect, I mean there were a lot of terrible people involved in the Northern Alliance, along with tremendous corruption in Afghanistan’s government. The Taliban, it turns out, were significantly worse.
So when it comes to determining what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine and what should happen next, the question is less about whether Ukraine is perfect. It certainly is not. The questions are: What exactly does Russia want?…
