Image credit: The White House, Flickr
For The Critic, Research Fellow David Polansky reflects on the United States’ role in the Russo-Ukrainian War and discusses the dilemma faced by U.S. foreign policy attempting to balance America’s “global identity” and the interests of the American people.
It is not impossible to argue for U.S. interests in supporting Ukraine against Russia. There is no such argument that will not have to wrestle with two dilemmas, however: the imperial nature of our present global arrangement, and its distance from the real concerns of most Americans. Hence the hysterical tenor that our foreign policy debates have taken on — and the unlikelihood that it will lift even when the Russo-Ukrainian War finally ends.
David Polansky (@polanskydj) is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy who writes on geopolitics, international orders, nationalism and state-formation, and the history of political thought. Outside of scholarly journals, his work has been featured in the National Interest, the American Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.