Anti-Climacus

WHICH THEN LEADS TO THE QUESTION: Of what exactly one should do given these options. One might like to accept the liberal notion that states act for reasons other than of power (though provide a stronger basis for it than norms); one might think that the realist account of international politics being driven by something like the will-to-power is mostly descriptively correct, but normatively lacking (and, importantly, descriptively wrong, though rarely, often enough to warrant some re-explanation of how states choose the policies they choose). But all of this, it seems to me, hinges on the question of what, if anything, it means for a state to be 'morally obligated' to do something: when one makes a statement of the form 'state x ought (normatively) to do y,' does one think of the state as some people who are in the state, the state as a unitary actor, or the state as an aggregation of the people in it (and are the last two a distinction without a difference)? Is there a difference (meaningfully) between 'Syria ought to get out of Lebanon' and 'The US ought to promote democracy around the world?'