I'm new to this thread, so I hope you "old timers" don't mind my intrusion into your conversation.
Ron Paul's ideas are interesting, but sometimes I wonder how they would work. Foreign policy, in particular.
Up until WWII, the US was a mostly internally oriented nation, with only a few small, and mostly limited foreign adventures, the main exception being our 'johnny-come-lately' entry into WWI.
Pearl Harbor changed that. That attack proved that a nation can't sit quietly and let the rest of the world swirl about them with a rich and productive nation acting as merely an observer of events. Other nations simply won't permit it.
At this point, let's please not get bogged down in all the events leading to Pearl, such as FDR's ambitions, our intervention in Pacific Trade, or all the other real and imagined foreign interference we committed. My point is simply that Pearl proved, conclusively, that the US cannot sit back and watch the rest of the world and not be part of the world.
I'm of the opinion that a nation must do more than exist in a protective crouch if it is to prosper, indeed, to exist at all. After WWII, Europe could not have survived as it did without our intervention and monetary assistance. The Soviets simply would not have allowed it. Would Ron Paul have allowed Western Europe to become a Soviet state?
Similarly, would Ron Paul have supported our occupation of Japan? Had we not been there, Japan might very well have re-militarized, and re-occupied China and SE Asia. Which would lead to a whole new set of imaginative consequences.
Then came Korea. I suppose Paul would object to Truman's interference there, too. Most likely, without US involvement, China (or, with Paul's ideas, Japan) would control the entire Korean Peninsula. That hegemony would extend throughout the Western Pacific.
Then JFK and LBJ got us into the disaster of Vietnam. Here, we could have used a President Paul, we really didn't need the region as a "back door" to Russia or China, but I guess it wasn't obvious at the time.
Anyway, the point of all this is just to say that, regardless of whether we SHOULD have intervened in other countries, the fact is, we DID. And we can't unring the bell.
Should the US begin to unwind our positions in the world, there are other players more than ready to take advantage of our absence, either individually or collectively. This isn't an unsupervised playground where all the children can be expected to "play nice" without any adults around. History can't be unwound or rewritten to remove the US from its position of influence, at least not without horrendous consequences.
I'll be among the first to agree that there are many examples of US mistakes in our attempts to manage the world. At the same time, I'd contend that no one else could have done better, despite our screwups. And I'd remind folks that like Colin Powell once said, (pardon if I misquote) "despite all the battles, treasure and blood we've poured into other nations, the only land we ask for is enough room to bury our dead." And we don't even ask for that anymore, we bring our dead back home.
Ron Paul, in some ways, is a dreamer. He can envision a world that should have been. This, to me, seems just fine, but not particularly realistic or practical. There are some ornery people out there, and they have armies as well as ambitions. To those who, like the young Bill Clinton, "loathe the military," I'd like to offer the bumper sticker aphorism, "if you're reading this in English, thank a soldier."
Again, my apologies to the regulars here who might not appreciate me injecting myself into this conversation. |
