Culture and history bunk is an excuse for letting people who don't have a European background rot and suffer, that's all. Why help those scruffy third world types when you can jet off to meetings in Paris, London, Bonn, and other cities where they have well groomed hookers and anything else you want certified by the locals as safe and even vetted by their intelligence agencies?
If we had left NATO when the Soviet Union collapsed do you really think it would have expanded eastward in blatant contradiction of what Russia was promised?
If we worried more about other parts of the world and less about Europe we wouldn't have the EU and their alligator mouth writing checks their rats butt can't cash and expecting us to make the checks good. In fact, we might even have good relations with Russia and several countries in the ME where they respect people who stand up for their principals instead of standing up for the bank accounts of "the right people".
Then again, talking to people in a country where folks would rather sit home and complain than throw scum like Barry out of office is pretty much a waste of time. I know the drill, it's "the Russians are coming" while Christians worldwide are slaughtered for sport and the righteous US government smooths the way for wonderful, peaceful, Muslims when they want to install fine folks like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yeah, culture and history, that's the way to go. All three hundred million of us need to worry about the other three hundred million of us in our "cultural" club and tell the 6.4 billion other folks to stuff it because they can't possibly impact our economy and security. What a typical redefinition of words to suit the agenda of the crowd in DC. "Strategic interests", it's all about cultural ties, not threats vs non-threats, long term relationships, and definitely not about right and wrong.