China, Russia, Saudi Arabia Make Foreign Policy a Sordid Business - Bloomberg
Would you sit down to dinner with a mobster? We know Frank Sinatra did, but that was different. Most of us have scruples about mingling with crooks.
Nations are different, however. Our political leaders are obliged to rub shoulders with people who kill people, or at least order them to be killed — think of the evidence pointing to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. All nations make daily compromises, devil’s bargains, in the interests of commerce. The global system would lurch to a halt if everybody who buys stuff from a given state, or sells to it, required a certificate of moral probity.
The West faces special dilemmas today, however, as abuses of human rights become ever more blatant in many countries. The irresistible advance of liberal democracy, rashly prophesied by Francis Fukuyama a generation ago in his influential but mistaken treatise, “The End of History,” has been overtaken by an apparently relentless ascent of tyranny.
Meanwhile in Washington, a new administration has taken office with a pledge to replace the morality-free presidency of Donald Trump with a commitment to American values — freedom, justice, decency — both at home and abroad. The “woke” movement, which is exerting formidable influence globally and especially in the U.S., seeks to seize ethical high ground. Young Westerners assess many issues, both those of the now and the past, through prisms of race or gender. In truth, alas, human history is mostly a narrative of the strong oppressing the weak, heedless of sex or skin color.
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