Column: Ukraine, Russia and the moral clarity of ‘good guys’ vs. ‘bad guys’

One of the silver linings of the very large dark cloud of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the clarity it provides. A lot of people who fancy themselves foreign policy realists roll their eyes at talk about “good guys” versus “bad guys.” The world is made up of nation-states with interests and those states act rationally on their interests. “The mistake of the ‘realists’ is not their interest in the struggle for power but their deliberate neglect of everything else, especially the non-scientific, contingent, very human feelings and beliefs that most powerfully move people,” the late, great Donald Kagan wrote in “Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy.” To claim that, say, North Korea’s foreign and domestic policy is simply an expression of its rational self-interest is to declare you don’t know anything about North Korea — or the decisions its rulers chose to make in turning that society into a xenophobic gulag. It’s hard to find a sane analyst who argues that Putin invaded Ukraine solely in the name of Russia’s rational self-interest rather than his own notions of glory and historical retribution, and it’s even harder to find one who thinks the invasion is objectively in the interest of the Russian people. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, which once claimed to be a legitimate news organization, recently declared that, “No big nation can exist without control over information” and that Russia should follow the Soviet or contemporary Chinese model, which would deny people freedom in “the political life of their country, in the informational life of the country.” With media voices like Simonyan in charge, no wonder Putin allegedly polls well in Russia.