22 November 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
The biggest and most important issue of our time is what the role of the
federal government should be in foreign affairs. With the election of Donald
Trump, the debate on this issue is coming out into the open. The issue is
interventionism vs. non-interventionism — that is, should the U.S. government
continue to intervene and meddle in the affairs of other countries or should
it be prohibited from doing so?
Of course, that's not to say that President-elect Trump is a
non-interventionist. We all know that he isn't. But because he made critical
comments of various aspects of the interventionist paradigm during the
presidential campaign, the interventionists are terrified that their
decades-long paradigm is experiencing some cracks. To get a sense of the fear
that is pervading the interventionist movement, see, for example, an op-ed in
today's New York Times by William S. Cohen and Gary Hart, entitled ''Don't
Retreat into Fortress America.''
During one of the Republican presidential debates, Trump pointed out that
George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on a bogus and fraudulent WMD
scare. In the eyes of interventionists, that is a super no-no. When it comes
to national-security state operations, everyone is expected to adhere to the
official narrative. No ''conspiracy theories'' allowed.
Or consider Trump's statement that any member of NATO that doesn't pay its
fair share of NATO expenses might not get defended by United States in the
event of war. Obviously, simply forcing member nations to fork over more money
to NATO isn't a non-interventionist position but instead just a complaint
about how NATO is operating. Nonetheless any criticism of this Cold War
apparatus is enough to send interventionists into a complete tizzy.
Time will tell whether interventionists have anything to fear from Donald
Trump. So far, judging by the people he is nominating for secretary of defense
(Marine Gen. James ''Mad Dog'' Mattis) and for CIA director (Congressman and
former army officer Mike Pompeo), it seems like Trump is setting the stage for
four more years of Bush's and Obama's perpetual warfare in the Middle East and
Afghanistan.
But interventionists have much more to fear from people other than Donald
Trump. They have to fear the American people, the vast majority of whom appear
to be rediscovering and embracing America's founding heritage of
non-interventionism. In an excellent op-ed published last July 4 in the Los
Angeles Times entitled ''For U.S. Foreign Policy, It's Time to Look Again at
the Founding Fathers' 'Great Rule,''' Texas A&M professor Elizabeth Cobbs
points out a statistic that would throw any interventionist into paroxysms of
anxiety and terror. She writes:
In 2013, for the first time since the Pew organization began polling Americans
on the question five decades earlier, the majority (52%) said the United
States should ''mind its own business'' and allow other countries to get along
on their own. Today, Pew finds, the number has risen to 57%.
And why not? After 25 years of continuous death and destruction in the Middle
East and Afghanistan, what could any reasonable person find redeeming about
the U.S. government's never-ending interventions?
Despite the fact that they lived under a brutal dictatorship, the Iraqi people
had a relatively high standard of living. And then came U.S. interventionism,
beginning with support of Iraq in its war against Iran, followed by the
Persian Gulf War, followed by the more than a decade of crippling and deadly
sanctions, followed by Bush's invasion, followed some 10 years of the Bush-Obama
occupation.
The result? Iraqi is an absolute hell-hole of violence, civil war, conflict,
chaos, and tyranny. And that's for the people still living. Think of the tens
of thousands of Iraqi people who are dead, owing to U.S. interventionism. Or
think of those who are alive and now penniless, or limbless, or homeless.
Or consider ISIS. It is a direct result of U.S. interventionism in Iraq.
Before the interventions, no ISIS. After the interventionism, ISIS, which is
now being used as the excuse for even more interventionism.
Or look at Libya, another nation mired in a violent and vicious civil war
owing to U.S. interventionism. Or Syria. Or Yemen. Or Afghanistan, where U.S.
troops continue to kill and die for no meaningful purpose whatsoever.
Indeed, consider the gigantic refugee crisis in Europe. That's a consequence
of U.S. interventionism also.
One problem in this debate is that the interventionists oftentimes conflate
the government sector and the private sector. Decrying Trump's wall, his plan
to deport illegal immigrants, his anti-Muslim sentiments, or his coming trade
wars against China and other countries, the interventionists decry
''isolationism'' and argue that it's better if the U.S. government continues
bombing and killing people in other countries.
They just don't get it. That's because in their minds, the federal government
and the private sector are one and the same thing. They are not. They are two
separate and distinct entities, a phenomenon confirmed by the Bill of Rights,
which expressly protects the country from the federal government.
Thus, the ideal is to restrain the federal government and unleash the American
people in the private sector. That would mean bringing all the troops home
from everywhere and discharging them. It would mean a dismantling of the
entire Cold War apparatus known as the national-security state, or what
President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. It would also
mean a total dismantling, not a reform, of the Cold War apparatus known as
NATO. It would mean no more butting into the affairs of other countries by the
U.S. government.
Non-interventionism would mean normal diplomatic relations between the U.S.
government and all other regimes in the world.
At the same time, the American private sector would be liberated to interact,
travel to, and trade with all other nations. No more embargoes, sanctions, or
trade wars. No more travel restrictions.
What interventionists also just don't get is that foreigners, by and large,
love Americans. They just hate the U.S. government, including the Pentagon,
the CIA, and the NSA, and its policy of foreign interventionism. To get a
sense of why foreigners feel this way, imagine if some foreign government
invaded the United States or fomented a coup here that installed a brutal
dictatorship into power, one that killed countless Americans who resisted the
regime-change operations and that threw the entire nation into a violent and
deadly civil war.
The interventionists are right to fear the American people. What happens if
that 57 percentage continues rising and gets to, say, 70 percent? That could
well mean that the American people would be on the verge of one of the biggest
breakthroughs to freedom and limited government in history. That would be
exciting to see. It would also mean that the country would finally be back on
the road to freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the
world.
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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