The emblem of the Soviet Union‘s KGB intelligence service boasts a sword sitting atop a shield. The sword represented the KGB’s aggressive global effort to advance Moscow’s communist-centered agenda. The shield represented the KGB’s defense of Soviet interests against the United States. The U.S., after all, spent the Cold War broadly focused on supporting other nations against KGB efforts to undermine or conquer them. America’s record is far from perfect. But support for free peoples has underpinned U.S. foreign policy since at least 1917.

No longer, it seems.