Who would win, Jason or Freddy? Batman or Superman? Thanos or Darkseid? The answers to such questions are more an indication of one’s preference than any actual in-world superiority. Crossovers can be fun, but let’s be honest, there’s a limit to how much continuity can hold up. One minute you’re outwitting an interdimensional conqueror or soloing the most powerful being in the known universe, the next minute a teenager disables you with math. Not even the advanced stuff, but…high school geometry.

For any piece of fiction to work, there must be suspension of disbelief. Storytellers are often taken to task for stretching this to extreme lengths, but its maintenance isn’t all on them. It’s an inherently collaborative phenomenon. Extreme skepticism on the part of the audience can pick apart even plausible story elements. Heck, it can even render actual reality unbelievable.

For instance, the reality is that cooperation requires not just a coincidence of wants, but a mutual sacrifice on the part of those involved. The goal is to arrange things so the sacrifices are sufficiently offset by what’s gained. I value my time, or my handiwork, or what-have-you, but I value your widget more. The inverse is true for you, so we trade. Get swindled too many times and you might become so skeptical that any offer seems stacked against you. After all, why should you be forced to give up your property for anyone or anything?

One shouldn’t be forced to make deals one doesn’t want, just like one shouldn’t be expected to shut down one’s brain to enjoy fiction, but one can hardly expect perfection in an imperfect world. If any deal that doesn’t meet expectations is unacceptable, the only alternatives are to live in near perpetual grievance or withdraw from civilization altogether.

If you want to enjoy modern life, you’ve got to accept some basic tenets of civilization. If you want to enjoy movies about sorcerers and superheroes, you’ve got to accept the explanations you’re given for their powers. Many won’t bat an eye at such statements, but even those who take issue with them will likely acknowledge some point of diminishing returns past which attempts to assert oneself are counterproductive.

So let’s say for argument’s sake that magic is real, that intense study by a suitably gifted pupil can make a Sorcerer Supreme out of a staunch materialist in a matter of months. Let’s say his natural talents have allowed him to leap frog an entire global network’s worth of wizards and become the most capable of the bunch. His power and rank are without equal.

At that level of power, he can’t help but pull others into his orbit and get pulled on by the orbits of others. In an interconnected world where the FBI agent assigned to monitor Scott Lang’s house arrest can team up with the grown-up daughter of Carol Danvers’ old Air Force buddy and Thor’s girlfriend’s lab assistant to save a town from the Scarlet Witch, at some point she and Dr. Strange are going to come into contact with one another.

Likewise, if John Q. Public is free to interact with Johann Q. Öffentlichkeit, it’s a safe bet that at some point the U.S. and German governments will have some interaction too. These interactions aren’t problematic in themselves, but they do raise the question of a balance of power. If push comes to shove between two powerhouses, which would win? What’s to stop a prophesied being of unfathomable magic or a nation with superior weapons from running roughshod over the globe?

Not much, apparently. When Wanda Maximoff decides that the only way to get what she wants is to lethally extract the dimension hopping ability of a young girl named America Chavez, the full might of Dr. Strange and his fellow sorcerers at Kamar-Taj can’t hold her back. Before her onslaught, she downplays her atrocious acts and intentions, saying, “You have no idea just how reasonable I have been.”

It’s hard to see how waging an unprovoked war for personal gain is reasonable, but her point is seen to be somewhat well-taken when she later demonstrates her full power. After jumping to another universe, Strange and America find themselves in the custody of the Illuminati, a super hero team whose hype is only surpassed by the ease with which they’re dispatched. The Scarlet Witch tears through them each in seconds, quite literally in a number of cases. Her aims are no more noble because of this demonstration of power, but from it we can see the extent of her prior restraint.

Restraint, yet again, is the rub. Even if the right course was always apparent (which it isn’t), walking it consistently is anything but easy.  Our missteps can cost the trust of others, trust in ourselves, our health, our money, our reputations, our jobs. Who among us hasn’t hurt others with horribly misguided and shortsighted motives? We can tell ourselves that we’re not villains like Scarlet Witch, that our mistakes don’t cost people their lives, but if they were magnified to godlike proportions, it’s a safe bet that some of them would have.

Sadly, our mistakes have been magnified to godlike proportions. The scope of our wrongdoing has been magnified right alongside our ability to understand and manipulate nature. We’ve managed to harness the power of the atom and turn it against our enemies. Like any weapon, nukes are designed to kill, and any evil they wreak is entirely in their misuse. Some even contend that to use such unfathomable power at all is to misuse it. To possess such a weapon but abstain from its use when fighting without it endangers you and your cause is being reasonable.

Like Wanda, United States foreign policy has been at times been misguided and self serving. It has, at other times, been selfless and exemplary. Like the Scarlet Witch, our immense capabilities have rewritten the previous balance of power. Where once we could sit back and enjoy watching a billionaire playboy philanthropist and an anthropomorphized space raccoon push each other to new heights of technical wizardry, we now can’t help but squirm as some of most powerful heroes in the MCU are dispatched quicker than a guy with a Nerf gun in a war zone. Before, the nations of the world were competitive, with slight edges occasioning a vacillation of influence. All that changed in 1945. Even though the Soviet Union had joined the nuclear club by the time of the Korean War five years later, the American advantage was still such that it could have ended any country that opposed it almost instantaneously.

These days, mutually assured destruction stays our hand, but there was a time when we could have dispensed with any military threat from North Korea, the Soviet Union, China, and anyone else who cared to join them, with less effort than the Scarlet Witch decimating a horde of Ultron drones. For all the considerable faults of American foreign policy, whatever the ultimate wisdom of intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq–you name it–the desire to cast America as an evil empire run by blood soaked monsters fails to address the fact that such unadulterated villainy inexplicably whiffed on a prime opportunity to take over the world outright.

A more sober analysis would find that global politics is and always has been messy. One can no more ‘end all wars’ than one can ‘end all murders,’ because they have the same ultimate cause. Evil gonna evil, and entities that exist for the sole purpose of navigating these eventualities can’t always save the day for everyone. We are to some extent defined by our imperfection, our tendency to fail, but we are not defined by our failures. As with any sin, our shame only serves a purpose if it helps us to avoid future missteps, if it helps us identify what was wrong about our actions.

Right and wrong are not so much a function of action or inaction as they are of the context in which each exists. Some situations call for precisely the action that would be utterly, indefensibly wrong in another. Crushing an enemy with a genocidal endgame is not the same as crushing an enemy who is trying to protect a child. Being reasonable is knowing when to flex and when to restrain yourself.