14 November 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
What will President-elect Trump do with respect to foreign policy? Will he
follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and pursue another
four years of death and destruction in the Middle East and Afghanistan? Or
will he move America in a different direction by finally bringing U.S. troops
home?
Unfortunately, he will be coming under tremendous pressure by both liberals
and conservatives to continue the death and destruction.
Reflecting the moral bankruptcy of the left on the issue of foreign policy,
so-called liberal revolutionary Bernie Sanders penned an op-ed entitled
''Where the Democrats Go From Here'' in last Friday's issue of the New York
Times. In his more than 800-word op-ed, Sanders enumerated the standard litany
of socialist and regulatory programs that he says liberals should continue
promoting: The minimum wage. Public works. Education grants. Social Security.
Medicare. Paid family leave. Public housing. Progressive income taxation. Of
course, what Sanders fails to recognize is that it is his socialism that is
the root cause of America's economic woes.
Nonetheless, there is one glaring omission from Sanders' op-ed: Not one single
reference to the U.S. government's death machine in Afghanistan and Iraq,
which has been operating now for some 25 continuous years.
I find that absolutely amazing … and appalling … and incredible. Imagine: a
liberal remaining silent about the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the
NSA, coups, assassinations, indefinite detention, Guantanamo, and the massive
death and destruction from U.S. interventionism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,
Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. Yeah, some ''revolution.''
All that continuous death and destruction at the hands of the U.S.
national-security state doesn't matter to liberals. Having supported it
throughout the eight years of the Obama administration, which followed the
same interventionist road that President George W. Bush took, liberals find
themselves stuck into hoping and pushing for another four years of death and
destruction under a Trump administration.
Of course, it's no different with conservatives. They are on the same
death-and-destruction page as liberals, if not more so. Having supported the
road to death and destruction that George W. Bush led America, and having
supported that road throughout the Obama administration, no one should count
on conservatives to suddenly abandon their death thirst.
The question is: Will Trump be able to withstand the pressure from both
liberals and conservatives for more death and destruction in the Middle East
and Afghanistan? Will he want to? Or will he become one of them with respect
to foreign policy?
Indeed, will he be able to withstand the pressure from the national-security
establishment, or what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial
complex, which would love another four years of military intervention given
that perpetual wars and crises mean ever-increasing warfare largess? No
president since John Kennedy has opposed the national-security branch of the
government, and we all know who won that political and ideological war. (See
JFK's War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was
Assassinated by Douglas Horne, Regime Change: The Kennedy Assassination by
Jacob Hornberger, and The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the
National Security State by Jacob Hornberger.)
So far, there are good signs and bad signs.
On the good side, Trump has indicated that he intends to cease U.S. support of
Syrian rebels. That very well could mean that he is going to abandon efforts
by the Pentagon and the CIA to bring about regime change in Syria. That would
be a good thing. It would certainly mean a lot less lives lost in Syria's
civil war.
A second good sign is that Trump has expressed little interest in a second
Cold War with Russia, which the national-security establishment has done its
very best to incite and which Clinton would have pursued with vigor if she had
been elected president. That would be a good thing too, especially since it
diminishes the chances of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
A third good sign is that Trump has expressed criticisms of NATO, the old
Cold-War era organization that should have been dismantled a long time ago.
Clinton loved NATO and would have used it to ramp up the new Cold War against
Russia.
A fourth good sign is that during the campaign Trump courageously pointed out
that the U.S. government's invasion of Iraq was based on fraudulent claims
regarding WMDs. While Clinton acknowledged that her support of the
Iraq War was a ''mistake,'' she never would have pointed out that Bush and his
national security establishment lied their way into a war of aggression
against a Third World country that had never attacked the United States.
What's the bad? Trump's eagerness to smash ISIS. My hunch is that he feels the
same about the Taliban in Afghanistan. If he goes down that road, which is
likely, he will be stepping into the quicksand of interventionism. That will
inevitably mean another four years of Bush-Obama — another four years of death
and destruction at the hands of the Pentagon and the CIA, accompanied by the
totalitarian powers of the president that have come with them, including
indefinite detention, torture, and assassination.
There is a force for good in all this — the millions of Americans who are sick
and tired of U.S. foreign interventionism and who embrace the libertarian
position of non-interventionism. As Texas A&M professor Elizabeth Cobbs
pointed out in her July 4, 2016, Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled ''For U.S.
Foreign Policy, It's Time to Look Again at the Founding Fathers' 'Great
Rule''' (which I highly recommend reading and forwarding to others), the Pew
research organization recently reported that 57 percent of Americans now want
the U.S. government to mind its own business and to let foreign countries work
out their own problems. That is an incredibly positive and encouraging
statistic. That's up from 52 percent just three years ago. We need to get that
number up to 70 percent.
Undoubtedly, many of the people who are sick and tired of continuous death and
destruction (including for U.S. troops and their families) voted for Trump.
They know that America is on the wrong track with foreign interventionism. The
question is: Will Trump succumb to the pressure from the left and the right to
continue the death and destruction, or will he move American in a different
direction — in the libertarian direction of America's founding principles of
freedom, peace, prosperity, and a limited-government republic?
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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