Instead of restructuring what had always been a defensive alliance, NATO went on the offensive in the 1990s. First, it admitted additional member states, such as Poland and Bulgaria, that had previously been members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Then, with the Clinton administration's support, NATO intervened vigorously in the Yugoslav Wars, most notably in Kosovo.

The analogies between the Kosovo war of 1999 and Putin's onslaught on Ukraine are not flawless, but they are startlingly comparable in certain aspects. Both involved direct military intervention by a superpower, were motivated (or at least justified) by claims of needing to protect an ethnic enclave within a larger country, violated the post-World War II norm that great powers do not use force to redraw national borders, and resulted in a massive refugee crisis.

The "conflict [in Kosovo] was launched without UN authorisation, and was a blatant violation of international law," writes Sarang Shidore, head of studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a realism think tank. "It was carried out in accordance with a new principle devised by the US and some of its allies known as the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P—the belief that serious human rights breaches justify the 'international community' intervening militarily in any part of the world. While persecution of human beings is unacceptable wherever, the highly arbitrary application (and non-application) of the principle by a group of powerful powers against those less capable reeked of opportunism even back then."

President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, the extended misadventure in Afghanistan) weakened the notion that superpowers should not violate the sovereignty of smaller states or engage in wars to destabilize unfriendly regimes. That is the same concept that the United States and NATO are now attempting to use to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine—in fact, none other than Bush himself has published a statement stating that exact premise.

Bush also advocated for raising the stakes in Ukraine. At a 2008 meeting in Bucharest, Romania, the Bush administration successfully lobbied for NATO to release a declaration promising Ukraine and Georgia potential membership (contrary to Germany and France's wishes). The so-called Bucharest Declaration elicited an immediate and forceful response from the Russian government, which announced plans to send military assistance to pro-Russia forces in Georgia and eventually invaded a portion of the country. Former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder has labeled the declaration NATO's "cardinal sin."

According to Chris Preble, co-director of the Atlantic Council's New American Engagement Initiative, "many eminent strategists warned that NATO enlargement was a mistake." "However, there was bipartisan agreement among foreign policy elites to ignore Russian security concerns. NATO expansionists said that NATO was primarily a defense alliance and hence posed no threat to Russia. This was a critical untested premise behind NATO expansion, a major blind spot that was never adequately investigated."

President Barack Obama's pledge to avoid "dumb crap" in foreign policy, as well as his administration's desire to "reset" relations with Russia, may have offered some hope of decreasing tensions. But much of that was thrown out the window when America openly attempted to sway the outcome of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, which deposed President Viktor Yanukovych for refusing to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union.

In a leaked phone call to American ambassadors, Obama's assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, showed a clear preference for a successor in Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who would become Ukraine's next president following the revolution. Senators John McCain (R–Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) visited Yatsenyuk during the protests and openly expressed American support for him, which would be strongly condemned if Russian officials were seeking to pick favorites in a Mexican or Canadian election.

Putin retaliated by annexing Crimea, and Obama, sensibly, chose not to escalate.

As he was leaving office in 2016, Obama provided the most realistic appraisal of the situation in Ukraine of any American president. "The fact is that Ukraine, as a non-NATO country, would be exposed to Russian military dominance regardless of what we do," he told The Atlantic, adding, "This is an example of where we need to be very clear about what our basic interests are and what we are willing to go to war for."

The lesson was forgotten. President Donald Trump defied his predecessors by openly asking for a rethinking of America's role in NATO and NATO's role in the globe, but his attempts were motivated by domestic populism rather than a serious attempt at diplomatic realignment. Trump was neither the Russian stooge that many liberals claimed nor the tough guy that many conservatives envisioned, but his administration remained committed to the 2008 Bucharest Declaration—a position that contradicts Trump's harsh criticisms of NATO and personal fondness for Putin—and, like Obama, Trump sold billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine.

Since the end of the Cold War, American presidents have made decisions that have echoed in the current crises. Whether directly tied to Ukraine or as larger representations of de facto foreign policy reality, such actions have shaped the contours of what is presently unfolding. Principles such as respect for national sovereignty cannot be abandoned in certain circumstances while considered insoluble in others, and even well-intended security agreements such as the Bucharest Declaration can contribute to aggravate tensions in harmful ways.

But, as Preble puts it, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington has refused to accept that "blindspot." The Biden administration has, in fact, continued this pattern. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated during his confirmation hearing in January 2020 that the Biden administration would continue to favor eventually extending NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

"If you are successful," Senator Rand Paul (R–Ky.) interjected, "we will be at war with Russia right now."

Avoiding a direct military clash between the United States and Russia must be America's top concern now more than ever. All of this history is irrelevant in comparison to what happens next.

While the actions of American presidents over the last 30 years do not excuse Putin's belligerence, today's decisions are built on previous ones. And the truth is that several American presidential administrations over three decades have made foreign policy decisions that have shaped the potentially catastrophic choices Putin, Biden, and other world leaders now face.

That's the most worrying takeaway from the annual Human Freedom Index, an annual report produced by the libertarian Cato Institute and the Frasier Institute, a Canadian think tank. The United States is ranked 15th most free country in the world out of 156 jurisdictions studied in this year's assessment, which was announced on Thursday.

Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia, and Ireland are the top five most free countries. The rankings, which take into consideration 82 measures of economic, personal, and civil liberties, place Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela, and Syria at the bottom.

Somewhere in the globe must be regarded the most free, yet worldwide trends are pointing in the wrong direction. The authors of this year's study observe that since the first report was released in 2008, roughly 83 percent of the world's population has seen their freedom erode. The divide between the most and least free countries has expanded as well, with almost 40% of the world's population now living in countries that score in the bottom 20% for total freedom.

"The decline in fundamental rights represents a disturbing trend that was occurring even before the world experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and its social and political effects," writes Ian Vásquez, vice president of international studies at Cato. "The areas that saw the largest falls globally were freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of association, assembly, and civil society. Although our report does not yet pick up freedom data from 2020, we fully expect to see a deterioration in global freedom indicators in future reports."

According to the latest research, freedom in the United States is declining in both absolute and relative terms. The United States was rated seventh in the world in 2008, but it has slowly declined since then, albeit it remains much above of the global average:

But the decline in freedom in the United States is nothing compared to what has happened in Hungary—a country now routinely (and wrongly) held up by segments of the nationalist right as an example that America should seek to emulate. Hungary ranks 59th in this year's index, down from a high of 29th in 2009. Recent efforts by strongman dictator Viktor Orbán to curtail freedom of expression and erode the rule of law are clearly reflected in the ratings, with Hungary now ranking considerably less free than its European neighbors:

As Reason noted last month, the twin threats of political populism and the COVID-19 pandemic have triggered an erosion in democratic values across the globe. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a nonprofit based in Sweden that has been tracking democracies around the globe since 1975, warns in a new report that the number of countries that are becoming "more authoritarian" by the group's calculus is three times the number of countries that are moving toward democracy. This year marks the sixth year in a row that the trend has been in that way.

While freedom and democracy are not always synonymous—and can often be at odds—democratic governments have done a better job defending and fostering freedom than authoritarian regimes throughout history. Both numbers now appear to be dropping in lockstep.

On October 22, 1981—exactly 40 years ago today—America's national debt hit $1 trillion for the first time.

"If we, as a nation, need a warning," President Ronald Reagan said in a televised address a few weeks before the country surpassed the 13-figure debt threshold, "let that be it."

Today, the national debt exceeds $28 trillion. In the fiscal year that concluded at the end of last month, the country added another $2.77 trillion to the pile, the Treasury Department announced just this morning. Even without any new expenditure, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the country will add at least another $1 trillion to the deficit every year for the foreseeable future.

If a trillion-dollar debt was a warning sign, it was ignored.

The Washington Post's contemporaneous coverage of the symbolic 1981 milestone is now a quaint window into a strange world. The paper reported that the country surpassed $1 billion in debt during the Civil War and then $500 billion in the mid-1970s. "In other words, half of the current trillion-dollar debt was incurred in the last seven years," the Post noted.

Shocking, right? Now, we run up half-trillion-dollar debts every few months.

Of then, $1 trillion doesn't buy as much as it used to. That sum in 1981 would buy around $3 trillion worth of goods now. Comparing the national debt to America's gross domestic product (GDP), a general estimate of the size of the country's economy in a particular year, is the best way to assess it over time.

In the early 1980s, for example, even as the gross national debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, the national debt was less than 40 percent of GDP. The national debt is now equivalent to the country's GDP and is on pace to be nearly 200 percent of GDP by the middle of the century, as this chart from Brian Riedl, a deficit hawk and former Republican Senate staffer now working at the Manhattan Institute, helpfully illustrates:

Another useful way to measure the growing national debt is to look at how much it would cost the average American household to pay it off. Again, the trend in recent decades is not a good one.

Rising costs of entitlement programs and the interest on the debt itself are the primary reasons why the debt will keep growing. In other words, even cutting a lot of discretionary spending would have little effect on the debt at this point.

The guilty parties are, well, both parties. It was fitting that the debt hit the symbolic $1 trillion figure during Reagan's presidency, as the Gipper ignored his own warning. Republicans have spent much of the past 40 years venerating Reagan as an icon of conservative values, including supposedly limited government. And while his successors ran up far larger amounts on the nation's credit card, Reagan saw the government surpass not only the $1 trillion debt threshold but also the $2 trillion threshold.

Meanwhile, few Democrats today agree with President Bill Clinton's admonition that "we have got to deal with this big, long-term debt problem, or it will deal with us."

"It will gobble up a bigger and bigger percentage of the federal budget we'd rather spend on education and health care and science and technology," Clinton, the last president to reduce the size of the national debt over a single fiscal year, warned at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

The guiding principle for today's Democratic Party is the idea that debt doesn't really matter if interest rates remain low. So long as the cost of servicing the federal debt stays below 2 percent, policymakers should not be restrained by the "traditional idea of a cyclically balanced budget," Larry Summers, Clinton's treasury secretary, and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman argued in an influential paper published last year.