Can Invading Neighbors Be a Neutral Principle?

Politics makes for some strange bedfellows, and right now they are never so strange as in foreign policy.  What does it mean when people like me find ourselves on the same side a deranged warmonger like John Bolton warning about Trump's general lawlessness?  Or agreeing with the ultra-MAGA Madison Cawthorn when he posts the anti-war tweet on the side.  

And what happens when right wingers start echoing our distrust of the FBI, the criminal justice system, the intelligence agencies and surveillance?  Are we just being hypocrites in defending these things?  Is it just a matter of whose ox is being gored?  And I suppose my answer is two-fold.  First of all, if you ever want to advance to cause of civil liberties, violate the rights of a right-winger.  Suddenly you will see a mass outpouring of civil libertarian sentiment.  The other is that we are going to have to hold to contradictory notions in our heads.  First of all, our intelligence/ surveillance/law enforcement establishment should not be trusted and should be kept on a tight leash to protect everyone's liberties, right wingers included.  And second, our institutions, flawed as they are, are still much preferable to giving unrestricted power to one man.  Especially if that man is named Donald Trump.

All of which leads me into the matter of foreign policy, and especially of the war in Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, our side finds itself with the choice of siding with neocons like Bolton who support military aid, or MAGA types who oppose it.  

So let me state my position clearly.  I support military aid to Ukraine.  And I do not see this in any way as inconsistent with opposing our invasion of Iraq (which I did).  It means that I oppose countries invading other countries, and that I oppose invasions as a neutral principle. There may be an exception in cases of humanitarian intervention -- invasion to stop civil war or genocide, although these are extremely difficulty to pull off successfully, and highly labor intensive.*  But complaints about corruption in Ukraine, as if this somehow justified invasion, are absurd. A country does not require a good government certification to earn the right to resist an invasion.  We backed the Soviet Union under Stalin when the Nazis invaded.  Backing a flawed and somewhat corrupt democracy is a no-brainer by comparison.

So what about people who oppose military aid to Ukraine.  They fit into several categories.

Some fear escalation and nuclear war.  I feared that myself at the outset.  But given what the Russians have taken without going nuclear, such fears appear to be overblown.  And more than that.  The danger of nuclear war has to be weighed against the danger of yielding to nuclear blackmail.  Refuse to aid Ukraine for fear of nuclear war, and you encourage aggression by other nuclear powers, secure in their arsenals.  And you encourage nuclear proliferation as countries across the world rush to obtain nuclear weapons as their only possible defense.

Some far left opponents like Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald, argue that the real danger is from the US.  The US is the only power seeking global hegemony.  Any attempt to "protect" other countries from regional hegemons is simply an attempt to bring more countries under US domination.  Sure, it would be best if there were no hegemons and every country had complete autonomy.  But barring such a utopia, in order to thwart US global hegemony, it is sometimes necessary to back the lesser hegemon as the lesser evil.  As to arguments that countries seeking to escape Russian domination don't seem to mind US domination, or point to the Russians' cruelty and brutality, Chomsky or Greenwald would presumably point to example of US cruelty and brutality and domination of unwilling countries,and tell us to take the beam out of our own eye before we criticize the mote in someone else's.  Or they dismiss the whole thing as unimportant since, as Lenin said, when you cut down a tree the chips will fly.  (That's Russian for saying you can't make omelets without breaking eggs).**

Others says that sure, one country invading another is a bad thing, but this one is a long way away and no concern of ours. I must admit that I once held this view myself.  I argued that the Russians were prepared to start WWIII over Ukraine and we were not, so the best the Ukrainians could hope for was to follow the Finnish example of domestic freedom in exchange for submission in foreign affairs.  Well, even Finland has decided that is no longer viable and has joined NATO.

But the one that interests me most is the viewpoint (increasingly common among the MAGA crowd) that we should not defend Ukraine from invasion, which Russia had every right to do, but should use our military strength to invade Mexico instead. In other words, some people appear to favor countries invading their neighbors as a neutral principle.  This is a spheres of influence viewpoint.  Certain regional hegemons should impose their will on their weaker neighbors and invade if their neighbors step out of line.  This view would condemn our invasion of Iraq, not because there is anything inherently wrong with invading other countries, but only because Iraq is outside our sphere of influence.  Instead, we should observe the Monroe Doctrine and limit ourselves to invading countries in the Western Hemisphere, all of which are fair game if they step out of line.  This viewpoint would also mean withdrawing from NATO and the Middle East.  Taken to its logical conclusion, it would also mean severing alliances with Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan, all of which are presumably in the Chinese sphere of influence, although somehow the MAGA crowd is actually strongly anti-China.  And, in all fairness to the MAGA crowd, this is a fair assessment of our pre-WWII foreign policy.  Though often derided as "isolationist," our isolationism was only from Europe.  The US quite regularly sent the Marines into Central American and Caribbean countries.  

But enough is enough.  There is a world of difference between invading another country and helping another country to resist invaders.  How hard is that to understand?

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*Russians and their apologists sometimes offer this justification to excuse the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.  They argue that the Russians were not invading, but intervening in an incipient civil war and head off a disastrous defeat for the pro-Russian faction.  The situation in 2014 really was chaotic, but to the extent that the Russians were seeking to quash an incipient civil war, they were highly successful.  No civil war occurred, and by 2022, Ukraine was not only at civil peace, but strongly united in opposition to any further Russian aggression.
**In some ways, by the way, the Russian metaphor is more honest than ours.  Ours is a creative metaphor -- to build an omelet (the new order) it is necessary to destroy some eggs (the old order).  Russians use a purely destructive metaphor.  When you cut down a tree (the old order), it is inevitable that flying chips will cause some collateral damage.