Ron Paul has placed American foreign policy front and center in the presidential election. Should we even be considering an alternative to our current policies? Definitely not, we’re told, by all of the other candidates for president, both Democrat and Republican. While they were consistently wrong about the prospects for ‘success’ in both Iraq and Afghanistan, most voters are still listening to them. Most voters don’t yet know that Paul emphatically predicted failure, in detail, on both fronts, while also warning about the inflating housing bubble and its inevitable consequences. When voters learn someone is running who actually predicted the establishment’s giant messes, more eyes and ears will turn to Paul.
Presently, voters are being brow-beaten into thinking that Paul’s foreign policy prescriptions are dangerous. Yet in spite of the constant barrage of negative sentiment from media and
GOP minions, Dr. Paul is seeking every opportunity to discuss foreign policy with voters. He knows that voters need more than a sound bite to challenge thinking that’s been entrenched for decades. His work is aided by a series of congressional actions, a pattern which provides inescapable proof of catastrophic foreign policy failure.
Consider the proper constitutional purposes of foreign policy: Avoiding
military conflict when possible, and keeping the population safe from foreign aggression. Our current foreign policy explicitly abandons the first objective; it requires us to actively seek and engage in war, ostensibly to insure the second objective, keeping us safe. That is exactly how the policy was sold to the
American people: We must fight them over there so that they won’t terrorize us over here. It’s probably not an all or nothing question – fighting them over there does not insure that they cannot come here to attack us. Our borders are essentially open; many nations likely have the ability to bring highly-coordinated terror attacks to our shores, if and when they choose, whether we occupy their lands or not.
But we’re not being attacked. Foiled plots are amateurish and often of dubious origin. Maybe all of the real radicals are staying put, in order to fight us over there. That would suggest that the policy is working as intended. But it would also mean that the policy may be endless – if we leave, they will come here, we are constantly told. If it is not safe to leave now, then when, and how can we know? Perhaps we can successfully defend our footholds there for many years and remain ‘safe’ at home. But at some point the people we are fighting will eventually become convinced that fighting us over there won’t dislodge us, and they will turn to the alternative, attacking us here.
In that event, after having abandoned the first proper objective of foreign policy, the same experts will have failed to achieve the second objective, keeping the threat of foreign aggression to a minimum. That would represent total failure of foreign policy, and compel us to examine alternatives. In fact, ongoing critical failure is precisely what we are experiencing. This fact can be established by examining the actions of American lawmakers.
Following 9/11, the ‘
Patriot Act’ was dusted off and introduced into law. We were told that some loss of liberty was necessary to insure our safety, and told that our trust would not be abused. Dissenters who cautioned that the Patriot Act was only the beginning were marginalized and written off as being un-patriotic. Congress passed the law without reading it, nonetheless assuring us it was just what was needed to protect us.
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