Putin’s apologists (and a somewhat smaller number of honest critics) will sometimes say that the United States can hardly complain about Moscow’s taking a proprietary interest in the affairs of nearby states — what is Russia’s position vis-à-vis Ukraine, Belarus, et al., if not the Monroe Doctrine transplanted? Why ought Putin to think any differently about the possibility of NATO forces and matériel in Ukraine than President Kennedy thought about Russian missiles in Cuba? That begs any number of questions. The Soviet Union was an expansionist police state that murdered some tens of millions of people — including, let us never forget, 3.5 million Ukrainians intentionally starved to death for political purposes in the Holodomor. The United States, as noted earlier, has a very large number of troops and bases in countries around the world, but the American troops in Germany and the Republic of Korea differ from the Russian troops in Ukraine (and now we can at least dispense with the fiction that there are no Russian troops yet in Ukraine) in many important ways: For example, the American troops would leave if asked. U.S. foreign policy is often boneheaded and sometimes atrocious, but the United States is a funny kind of imperial power, one that reverses the usual direction of cash flow in imperial relationships, providing aid and investment rather than demanding tribute…

Ukraine need not be governed by angels nor situated on the border of the United States to have a legitimate claim on Washington’s attention — as I argued last week, this is a Putin crisis, not a Ukraine crisis: There was no precipitating event in Ukraine that has brought the two countries to the brink of war. Our neo-Taftians may envy Swiss neutrality, but the United States is not Switzerland and cannot conduct itself in the world as though we were. Our national interests encompass many factors that our borders do not. But I fear that we have lost the ability to comprehend our national interests in anything but economic measures — and crude and short-term economic measures at that, as though our real problem with Beijing were jobs in carpet factories. Americans at large, and President Biden in particular, would think differently about what Putin is up to if factory payrolls in Ohio were directly implicated. But they aren’t, and so Washington has no good answer when Americans ask: “What’s in it for us?”