Some good insight here on the Losing War over Ukraine. We'll skip to a particularly useful couple of grafs.
...Outlining the principles of British foreign policy in 1852, the Foreign Secretary Lord Granville wrote that “it is the duty and the interest of this country, having possessions scattered over the whole world, and priding itself on its advanced state of civilization, to encourage moral, intellectual and physical progress among all other nations.” This self-image of Britain as both global policeman and mentor bred a conflict between the muscular and pacifist wings of British liberalism, with non-interventionists like John Bright and Richard Cobden arguing that it was free trade which would civilize the world and the interventionists saying that free trade was only possible in a world made civil by British power and British values. What is striking today is the collapse of that pacifist tradition...
GWB did a good copy/paste of that balderdash.
...The claim to the higher moral ground of democracy and human rights would justify attempts to spread western values to those areas that remained mired in dictatorship and autocracy. Arguably Britain’s most successful export was the export of its moral evangelism to the United States as America emerged from its isolationism....
Yah, Wilson bought it hook-line-sinker, too. Wilson is key, friends...
... The comparison of Putin with Hitler comes from a sweeping generalization that sees democracy as the peaceful form of the state and autocracy as its warlike form. Against this we should counterpose the notably “realist” summary of historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth century fought ‘just’ wars and killed millions.” It’s the idealists who are more likely to want to win at all costs, the autocrats who want to stop wars before their thrones crumble....
As to "Our Evangelization Works!!" crapola---ask Iraqis, or Algerians, or nearly anybody in South and Central America, or Afghans.
You call that "working"?
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