It is a bit more complicated than that.
Our willingness to use force - whether our industrial power, wealth, technology, or armed forces - should be determined by national interest. Our involvement in the Middle East, a historic area of British and French interest, has been driven by oil - ever since the first contracts between Standard Oil and the Saudi Royal family in the thirties.
Indeed, one can argue Israel is the something of an outlier in that cold assessment of national interests. But in that case, we can trace a moral imperative that dates to the refusal by this country to take Jewish refugees from Germany in the late thirties as World War II and the eventual Holocaust loomed.
The one tends to complicate the other as we have dealt with and responded to terrorist threats or attacks that have seldom had much to do with the economic imperative of commercial access to the region's natural resources. Though, those too often can be traced, at least in part, to decisions made in support of our commercial national interests - i.e. Iran.
Obviously, our employment of power, military or otherwise, often comes with strings. The Saudis, for instance, have never deployed military forces to support us, but they have underwritten much of our clandestine activity in the region since the fifties.
Ukraine is another example of national interests. Most people with a bit of memory of the Cold War have an understanding of the role Russia is capable of playing in undermining the stability of Western Europe and thus our commercial relationships with the region. Preventing a revitalized Russia from playing a meaningful role in our growing contest with China is another. To your point, Ukraine did send contingents as part of the NATO support of our efforts in Afghanistan. Though, those deployments were clearly in their national interests as well as Ukrainian officers gained practical experience in the Western way of war from their NATO counterparts.
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