However, the hard reality sometimes turns out to be quite different, especially when it comes to foreign policy where cynicism, double standards and attempts to gain geopolitical advantage at any cost often prevail over idealistic and often naïve expectations.
In Ukraine we are told that the overthrow of the legitimate president and the entry of the country into an Association Agreement with the EU had nothing to do with geopolitics, but with the further promotion of democracy and Western values.
Nazi collaborators and mass murderers Bandera and Shukhevych are official national heroes with no outrage or at least a soft rebuke from the West; criminal fugitive Saakashvili who is wanted by American ally Georgia is appointed (not elected) as the governor of the Odessa region while his and his staff’s salaries being covered by US taxpayers.
Despite the Minsk agreement the Donbass region is subjected to indiscriminate artillery shelling by Ukrainian army and private battalions, some of which are qualified as neo-Nazis even by the US Congress.
Canada is definitely a western country and last time I checked I found it to be a federation with two official languages.
Switzerland too is a federation but with four official languages. I am sure we can identify many other western countries with similar structures. Incidentally, isn't the United States a federation as well? And while Spanish is not the official de-jure language it definitely is a de-facto language.
“The reason we promote democracy around the world is because democratic countries do not start wars,” said George W. Bush many times before and after invading Iraq, but it took his brother Jeb some time and effort to finally admit during the recent Fox News debates that his brother was wrong to do that.
How long will we have to wait to hear that Obama’s Libya and Syria policies were also a huge mistake? The result was not only utter misery and devastation in those countries, but also an enormous flow of African and middle-Eastern refugees to Europe, not to mention the rise of ISIS — a new generation of terrorists who easily put Al-Qaeda to shame.
Unfortunately, all this leads not only to a bloody trail of countless dead, chaos, ruin, hatred and strife but to the real possibility of the military confrontation between the United States and Russia.
If this happens one should wonder how many survivors will be left to have intellectual discussions on Western values and the best way to promote them.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
