Greg Ip

In his view, American greatness does not flow so much from values such as the promotion of democracy and freedom.

It flows from more tangible things like military power, economic strength, and territory.

And he is making it clear that when you are deciding whether to invade another country, those sorts of economic interests, including your control of their precious resources, those aren't some tertiary factor.

They are front and center.

You have to sort of like divide US foreign policy in the post-war period into two phases, the Cold War and the post-Cold War period.

So during the Cold War period, the North Star was push back communism.

And the United States did a lot of, you know, unsavory things in the pursuit of pushing back communism.

We fomented a coup d'etat in Iran.

We pushed out duly elected people like the president of Chile because they were too close to the communists and the Russians.

It was less about containing the Soviet Union, which no longer existed.

It was more about spreading democracy and also keeping the world stable and free of the influence of rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

It was primarily an ideologically driven approach to foreign policy, where the goal was to make the world, as America saw it, safer for the things that Americans valued like democracy and freedom.

Sure.

Well, a very good example would be in the original peace negotiations with Ukraine, right?

So the president made it clear upon taking office that he wanted to end that war, stop the killing.

But he also wanted to end it on terms that were very favorable to the United States.

He stopped giving weapons and so on to Ukraine.

He arranged for European partners to pay for those weapons.

And he also essentially pressured Ukraine into signing an agreement that would give the United States a piece of its mineral wealth in the event of a peace settlement.

Now, was that settlement actually worth much to the United States?