Treat Others

We wouldn’t want our president to be kidnapped by another country, so why should we be able to kidnap Venezuela’s? Shouldn’t we treat others the way we want to be treated?

It’s not possible to set the principles governing a relationship unilaterally. Other countries aren’t kidnapping our president and dropping bombs on us not because they decided not to but because they can’t. That’s the only true reason. And the only way for us to avoid them becoming capable of it is to be preemptive and extremely strong.

Look at what happened to Ukraine, which by the way is the largest country in Europe. Thirty years of trying to be nice, crawling on their stomachs, looking kindly and imploringly into everybody’s faces. Thirty years of trying to ingratiate themselves. No, we don’t need borders, whatever you say. No, we don’t need nukes. No, we don’t need an army. Let us disarm to show our good will. Let us hire Russian citizens for every important position in defense and intelligence to show how sweet and open-minded we are. Let’s elect a president who promises to lick the Russians’ paws. Great results that brought Ukraine. Getting bombed into the ground is the reward for all that niceness.

Of course, in our private lives we should all follow the Christian principle of do unto others. But that only works on an individual level. You can turn your other cheek. But it’s not OK to turn the cheeks of millions of people. An administration that refuses to engage in an aggressivy pursued foreign policy turns the cheeks of its citizens.

This does not mean that every aggressive foreign action is justified. Neither does it mean that none are. There’s a sea of options between “let’s do nothing” and “let’s do everything.” These two options are exactly the ones taken respectively by Ukraine (until February 2022) and Russia. Don’t they both suck? I’d say they really do.