In the same post in which Freddie has given James and his realists a hiding, he said:

Ah, but of course, if there is one iron-clad rule to our foreign policy debate, one insisted on by realists, liberal internationalists and cons, paleo and neo [bold mine-DL], it’s that there is no “moral equivalence” between America’s actions and those of our antagonists.

Now this is odd. Paleos have been accused of many things over the years, but holding any identical view with these other groups with respect to U.S. foreign policy is not usually one of them. I suppose it does depend on what actions we’re talking about, but on the whole I think Freddie has rather badly misunderstood paleos if he thinks that we assume our government’s actions can never be morally equivalent to those of other states or of our enemies.

I think Freddie would find that this is one of many iron-clad rules of conventional debates that we do not follow, and I’m surprised that he doesn’t already know this about us, but it’s important to understand why we don’t. It isn’t to be contrarian, and it isn’t simply to play a senseless game of “well, what about [fill in with some past wrongdoing by U.S. government to score cheap point]?”, but it is to keep perspective that our government’s use of coercion and force is extremely dangerous and prone to abuse, just as it is with every state, and justice and a respect for truth demand that we try to keep our government from abusing such power and acknowledge when it has abused it. This is tied to our hostility to various triumphalist ideologies and armed doctrines and our critiques of nationalism, all of which have done more to justify dehumanizing other peoples than just about anything else.

If we’re discussing aggressive warfare, for example, I would make the case that over just the last twenty years the U.S. government has outdone pretty much every other state in waging such wars, at least if we’re talking about the sheer number of unprovoked military campaigns launched. These are illegal and unjust acts, and they are just as illegal and unjust when our government does them as when they are committed by other states. For all of the conventional talk of Russian aggression these days, for instance, Washington has been responsible for more aggressive wars just during my lifetime (at least three) than Moscow. That’s a rather troubling thought, isn’t it? I would agree with Freddie that it is hard to imagine someone from any of those other groups saying as much, but then that’s one of the reasons why paleos disagree with all of those people as often as we do.