Russia annexed Crimea and the foreign policy establishment reacted with the kind of bipartisan astonishment that tells you everything you need to know about the foreign policy establishment. Senators who had been photographed shaking Putin's hand six months earlier went on television to express shock. Columnists who could not find Sevastopol on a map wrote urgent essays about the collapse of the post-Cold War order. Everyone was surprised. Nobody should have been.
Whether the D or the R occupies the White House, American foreign policy operates on the same foundational assumptions, and most of them are wrong. The first assumption is that other nations are primarily motivated by their desire to be like us. The second is that our military dominance translates into political influence in situations that are not, in fact, military. The third, and most dangerous, is that the "international rules-based order" we invoke with such reverence is something the rest of the world signed up for voluntarily and regards with the same quasi-religious respect we do.
Russia did not annex Crimea because Putin is crazy or because he misread the situation. He annexed Crimea because Crimea has a Russian-speaking majority, a Russian naval base, and strategic significance to Russia that vastly exceeds its significance to anyone else. He calculated — correctly — that the United States and Europe would protest loudly and do very little, because there is nothing they can do that would hurt Russia more than it would hurt them. Sanctions on a country that supplies a third of Europe's natural gas are not sanctions. They are negotiations conducted under a different name.
I spent a decade in political consulting, which is to say I spent a decade studying how people actually make decisions as opposed to how they claim to make decisions. The gap between those two things is where most of politics actually happens. Foreign policy is no different. The stated reasons for American interventions abroad are almost never the real reasons, and the real reasons are almost never discussed in public because they would make the stated reasons sound naive.
We did not invade Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. We did not intervene in Libya because of humanitarian concerns. We are not interested in Ukrainian sovereignty because we care deeply about the self-determination of Eastern European peoples. In each case, the actual calculus involved energy markets, regional power balances, domestic political pressures, and institutional momentum — the tendency of a national security apparatus with a $700 billion annual budget to find things to do.
The delusion is not that American foreign policy serves American interests. Of course it does. That is what foreign policy is for. The delusion is the insistence that it does something else — that it serves freedom, democracy, human rights, the international order — and that anyone who questions that framing is naive, unpatriotic, or "isolationist," which is the word the establishment uses for anyone who suggests that maybe we should stop invading countries for a while.
The bipartisan nature of this delusion is its most durable feature. Republicans and Democrats disagree about almost everything except the fundamental premise of American global dominance. A Republican hawk and a Democratic interventionist may argue about tactics, but they share the assumption that it is America's job to manage the world, and that the world, properly managed, will come to resemble America. This assumption has survived Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria without losing any of its adherents, which tells you that it is not really an empirical belief. It is a religious one.
Putin is many things, most of them unpleasant. But he is not irrational. He is a strategic actor pursuing national interests with the tools available to him, in a region where Russia has deep historical ties and genuine security concerns. The fact that we do not like his conclusions does not make them irrational. The fact that we would prefer a different outcome does not mean we are entitled to one.
The adults in the room — and there are some, in both parties, though they are systematically excluded from the conversation — understand this. They understand that a multipolar world is not a threat but a reality. They understand that other nations have interests, histories, and domestic pressures that do not align with ours, and that this is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed. They understand that the greatest risk to American security is not a foreign adversary but our own inability to tell ourselves the truth about what we can and cannot control.
But the adults are not on television. The people on television are the ones who are surprised that Russia acts like Russia.
