Two Important Points

 Ezra Klein interviews Fareed Zakaria and there are two important points that Zakaria makes.

The first is that we don't properly appreciate the value and unusual nature of the Pax Americana since 1945.

The second is that America needs to face its own hypocrisy, especially towards China.

These two points are linked in a defense of the "liberal international order" that America has promulgated since 1945, and in fact has been talking about in some sense since 1776. America believes in a rules-based international order with some function of international law that avoids interstate conflict.

However, we have not always followed our own model on this. The worst offense is, of course, Iraq.

The invasion of Ukraine has dredged up a lot of feelings I had about Iraq that have not mellowed with time. I started this thing in 2010 after Iraq had largely played itself out, but those feelings have not abated. Iraq was both wrong and a mistake. It was wrong towards Iraqis, which footage from Ukraine helps drive home. We don't target residential areas the way Russia does, but residential areas still got pummeled that war. Unleashing war is awful, whatever your goals and motivations are. Let's say that establishing a democracy in Iraq was the actual goal - I doubt it, but let's say that anyway. The bloodshed unleashed on that country was terribly, terribly wrong.

What's more, it represented a betrayal of the sort of world order that Bush's father had so successfully defended in Kuwait a decade or so earlier. 

Some idiot in Twitter was whinging about NATO's campaign in the '90s against Serbia, as if that was somehow the same as the invasion of Ukraine. In the Balkans, NATO and the US was preventing an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. It was trying to establish limits on the use of violence by a government against its citizens. Similarly, the invasion of Afghanistan was a direct response to a catastrophic attack on the US.

Iraq was neither of those things. We are seeing - I hope - how fragile the order we built after World War II is, and we helped degrade that order when we invaded Iraq.

Zakaria believes - and I mostly concur - that America's current stance towards China is stupid and shortsighted. China is unquestionably a rival power, but it need not be an opponent. China is a country that also wants an international system based on rules, and making it a pariah state undermines their own commitment to that order. China has not endorsed Russia's invasion, but neither has it condemned it as strongly as we would like, because we have more or less aggressively pushed Russia and China together. 

Zakaria is part of a growing chorus that does not see a potential "exit ramp" for this crisis. He notes that dictators in Venezuela, Iran and North Korea have survived economic isolation, and Putin will, too. I'm still hopeful. Theda Skocpol noted the role that international humiliation is a good leading indicator for revolution. The other model is relative deprivation. If things are worse that you think they should be you will revolt, rather than any absolute measure of deprivation. Both apply to Russia.

Finding a way out seems hopeless at the moment. I worry that Putin will finish conquering the Black Sea coast, linking up with Russia nationalists in Transnistria (a breakaway region of Moldova) and then declare victory. Ukraine would exist, but as a rump state. Would we continue sanctions that will cause some pain in our societies as well?

Allowing Putin to annex a sovereign country's territory is an invitation to unravel the Pax Americana, which would be a very bad thing.