Approaching foreign affairs as an avocation offers much the same experience as any subject will a dabbler. If one writes about it, elementary learning is done at the same time as critical analysis, the review of work by scholars and professionals bringing some moments of feeling vindicated (for having intuited a truth, necessarily without academic direction) or sheepish (for reinvention of the wheel, necessarily without academic direction).
My introduction to former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died yesterday at age 80, was in Berkeley Breathed's newspaper comic strip Bloom County. Kirkpatrick, an unseen character, had an unlikely and tortuous romance with a reckless Bill the Cat. Breathed, left-of-center but in the latter 1980s able to keep good company with the right, once attributed to his Kirkpatrick a message the real one would have been happy to say: "U.N. sucks eggs!"
Mark the passage of several years and my later investigation into this woman, a Cold Warrior, an ally of Ronald Reagan and the late twentieth century right, whose non-fictional message was that the modern left preferred to "Blame America first." Kirkpatrick condemned the United Nations for what it was and ever will be, a kleptocratic parody of global mediation; and on one hand is credited for an eponymous doctrine that tolerated anti-communist despots for the propulsion of strategy against the Soviet Union, on the other writing a dozen books on world politics and humanity and the morals and obligations therein. Few of Kirkpatrick's written works are to be found in general circulation, though her words can be read. Asked, by the Acton Institute, in the immediately postbellum year of 1992, about "remaining authoritarian regimes," Kirkpatrick answered to confirm the rightness of the Cold War's victor.
"I always assume," she said, "that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred. I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity. We should make that clear and help to achieve it where we can."
Her reservation was one of logistics and prerogative, can't and shouldn't go everywhere at once; meaningfully conservative. Commitment to liberty, however, was for her that by which American greatness was subtended. Thirteen years later, after she joined with other rightists to meet the next assault from authoritarianism, Kirkpatrick spoke again on the subject, testifying to the House of Representatives that "Those of us who enjoy the benefits of freedom should never forget the millions who do not." One may be an optimist, a meliorist, without tripping over a naked Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From what I know of her, which is a little but not much, Jeane Kirkpatrick was canny, her ideals meant to be practiced. There is reading to do.