Andrew Sullivan joins the smugness bandwagon on Georgia, calling the besieged country “uppity” and issuing this shameful bit of relativism:
That’s a ghastly thing to write. Our own national sins and failures do not excuse Russian violence and aggression, nor do they relieve us of the obligation to condemn or oppose such immoral acts. It is one thing to embrace geopolitical realism, to recognize that even tacitly encouraging the Georgians was a catastrophic mistake, to acknowledge that this sort of Russian response was to be expected, and to resolve that prudence and caution dictate a measured reaction that carefully considers our interests and the price of intervention. It is quite another to conclude that American misconduct ought to grant carte blanche to other powers to follow suit, or that no violation of human rights is worth condemning until it exceeds our own.
Comments are closed.