Commentary
Fifty years ago, as a fresh college graduate, I tried to understand the whys and wherefores of the Vietnam War. Today, I’m grappling with similar questions about the American role in Ukraine. Let me start by expressing gratitude for a major difference: U.S. troops are not dying on Ukrainian territory.
The first question (and let me say up front that I don’t pretend to have “the right answer”) is: Should we have gotten involved in the conflict by helping to arm the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion? This question points to two strains of thought about American involvement in global geopolitics—the realistic and the idealistic….