Tom Cotton's 'Unconventional' View

This is bog-standard Cold War hawk thinking at its laziest.

Tom Cotton thinks he has hit upon a brilliant new insight:

In a fallen world we have to take our friends where we find them… What matters, in the end, is less whether a country is democratic or non-democratic, and more whether the country is pro-American or anti-American. I’ll confess that those views may be somewhat unconventional, but look at where conventional thinking has got us.

Cotton’s view is one of the most conventional, unoriginal opinions that any American politician has ever expressed. This is bog-standard Cold War hawk thinking at its laziest. It is a view that has been used to justify support for any number of dictatorships, coups, civil wars, and military interventions. Most policymakers in Washington subscribe to this view right now, though some might not be as blunt about it as Cotton. It has been a basic assumption informing how the government conducts foreign policy for as long as I can remember. Cotton pretends that he is offering up an “unconventional” view to make it seem as if he is bravely dissenting against some prevailing orthodoxy, but he is just echoing the same stuff that every advocate of U.S. hegemony has been spouting for decades.