My wife tells me, however, that The Next Generation has a couple of instances where Picard actually took the Prime Directive seriously, and some seriously bad stuff was tolerated rather than open up the can of worms that Kirk opened up, it seemed, every other episode.

Well, except when they think it isn’t the right thing to do which, apparently, was much of the time. The Prime Directive was more of a conceptual foil than it was actually an expression of an ideal principle. It kind of seems that because the PD resonates with your political views, that you’re ignoring how it actually functioned in the stories. Over and over again the stories “problematized” the PD by creating situations in which characters we knew to be good felt compelled to break this rule; thus showing the shortcoming of this rule as a sort of moral constant that could be universally applied at all times. You seem to be put off by what might be described from one point of view as moral relativism, but from another view might be described as humanitarianism (or perhaps entityism in scifi?).

And then there’s the dramatic considerations. Story telling in our culture revolves around conflict and resolution. If Kirk and company kept flying around the universe, showing up at various planets and saying “Yep, this situation is dire and we’d love to do something but our steadfast adherence to the Prime Directive prevents us, ” that would make for some pretty boring storytelling. Now, one could argue pretty convincingly that we’d get better stories if violating the Prime Directive blew up in people’s faces more often, but conflict is still the driver there.

The two most challenging episodes to the Prime Directive in TOS were probably “A Private Little War” (the vietnam episode) or “Return of the Archons“. In the first one, the Klingons have already begun arming one side of a conflict on the planet, and thus Kirk feels compelled to arm his friends in order to counter the external enemies — the episode leaves strangely unsaid wether this program of arming Kirk’s side is continued after he leaves. In “Archons,” they visit a planet in which all society is controlled by a computer and enforced with mind control. In fact, the planet is a perfect Totalitarianism; the computer, “Landru,” is regarded as an all-knowing God. Kirk uses his ship’s superior weapons and technology to destroy the computer, plainly violating the directive, because he reasons that the Prime Directive only applies to a “living, growing society.” At the end of the episode one is left seriously wondering how all of the people on the planet will feed and clothe themselves without the Landru computer.

The Prime Directive is best understood as a sort of “Three Laws of Robotics” for Star Trek. It espouses an ideal that everyone can pretty much agree with, or at least comprehend the reasoning, and then the show demonstrates all of the ways the ideal can break down, in the breach and the observance.

The comparison is a little silly, though, since the Prime Directive isn’t based on anything like “sovereignty,” I don’t ever recall ever hearing the word in any ST series or movie. It’s based on simply preventing non-spacefaring planets from having to confront the reality of not being alone in the Universe, until those peoples themselves have the ability to travel between the between planets. It has nothing to do with respecting or abiding by the decisions of a people, or not interefering with the decisions of a planetary government, particularly if those people are aware of space travel. Indeed, many episodes in TOS and TNG depict the crew of the Enterprise going to lengths to change the course of an unsuspecting planet’s history, and this is considered perfectly acceptible as long as the beknighted people involved aren’t aware that there are such a thing as aliens. The Prime Directive and “paleocon non-intervention” are two similar-sounding but quite different concepts.

You’d have to be an extraordinarily doctrinaire non-interventionist to advocate anything like a Prime Directive approach to US foreign policy. Non-interference in other state’s domestic affairs is one thing. A policy of deeming other states too primitive to even be graced with the knowledge that the United States exists is a bit more extreme. Similarly, you can respect a state’s desire to protect its most important industries without going further and arguing that any economic or cultural exchange at all is too dangerous to the less-powerful culture. According to the Prime Directive it makes sense for an entire civilization, including all its people, to perish in a natural disaster, since saving anybody would halt that civilization’s natural progression towards extinction. I know paleo-conservatives aren’t known for their sentimentality, but I don’t think they’re quite that, uh, mean.

The Prime Directive is routinely disregarded on Star Trek because it’s so hard for a rational or moral person to take it seriously. A more flexible approach (like the way the crew on TNG actually makes decisions when the Prime Directive clashes violently with common sense, morality, ethics, etc.) seems more reasonable.