They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself.

At least the author identifies himself correctly.

Edit:

The answer, of course, is that geopolitics is complicated and often lacks clear-cut moral choices. Containment of the Soviet Union made sense overall even if it didn’t justify intervention in certain places, like Vietnam. Ever since America’s birth, we have grappled with the tension between our stated ideals of freedom and our government’s sometimes illiberal actions—some justifiable, some horrific—taken out of self-interest. Cherry-picking the bad data points, oversimplifying the complex and ignoring the good is a great way to slap together what the authors themselves label “potted history.” At least, when others do it.

This is pretty funny because in the sentence before this moral posturing and his pleading for being super nuanced he basically summarized Stalin as a mass murderer on par with Hitler, in literally one sentence.

But what do I know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯