Here again in the Ukrainian affair we see the Manichean habits of mind of the Cold War, still the most powerful precedent in the last 50 years of American and Western political history and policy studies.
Among commentators and officials the tendency continues to be to frame international affairs in bipolar terms, as obviously has been the case for the whole "global war against violent extremism" — as U.S. President George W. Bush's "war against global terror" was renamed by the Obama administration: a war which, under any name, self-evidently has no conceivable possibility of being won.
What that effort accomplished was to cause vast human suffering in the Middle East and Afghanistan, to no positive result; and to inflict devastating collateral damage on international law and justice, on the American practice of habeas corpus and trial by jury of peers, and on the moral character of the American government, whose record in recent years has been to win no victories, but wage wars leaving behind them ruined societies and the grieving innocent.