Of U.S. Foreign Policy
There are 30-40 wars going on in the world at any given moment. The United States of America is involved in virtually every single one, in many cases providing support to both sides of each conflict. We currently have nearly 400,000 military servicemen and women deployed overseas at more than 800 bases (61 of them being "major installations") in 130 of the world's 193 countries.[1] We are now sending $25,000,000,000 per year to other countries in the form of foreign aid, nearly double what we were sending in 1997,[2] while our own national debt increases by $500,000,000,000 per year. To help pay for all this, we must borrow $3,000,000,000 from other countries every day, while the Federal Reserve frantically prints up more dollar bills to increase the money supply. As a result of this inflation, the dollar today is actually only worth about three or four cents.
While liberals tend to be more accepting of government as a tool for solving society's ills, the most baffling predicament is that of conservatives, who vehemently fight big government at home, while act as its biggest supporters abroad! Why should we think, on the one hand, that bloated government bureaucracies have no business trying to run a welfare state and tell people how to live at home, while, on the other hand, we believe that it's not only acceptable, but that it's somehow the responsibility of bloated government bureaucracies to do the same things abroad?
This big-government foreign policy was first introduced by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (in office, 1913-1921) in his declaration that it was America's duty to "make the world safe for democracy." It was then through Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) and Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) that this radical idea was set into stone. Since then, most Americans have merely assumed that it was the American government's responsibility to pick a side (or two) in every conflict around the world, to stop every civil war, to topple every dictator, to prevent every genocide, to make sure everyone plays nice and nobody gets hurt. For decades, we have taken for granted the notion that unelected foreign bodies like the United Nations have the right to make laws to govern the American people, that we cannot take action without the UN's permission, that American troops must don the UN's uniforms and wear the UN's insignias in order to "keep the peace" in conflicts halfway 'round the world that do not in any way threaten the security of the United States. Yet, this wrong idea, shrouded as it is in the most humanitarian of terms, has brought our country to the point of severe military overstretch abroad and the brink of economic collapse at home.
Why are we continually so surprised when our government fails to prevent a genocide in Africa, or when our government finds it doesn't have the wisdom to solve a religious struggle that has been raging in the Middle East for thousands of years, or when our government can't Westernize the most ancient of societies? We should be no more confused or angry at our government for failing to make a good policeman and social worker for the world, than we should be at our plumber for failing to make a good open heart surgeon! The fact is: it's simply not their job.
Just as your plumber doesn't have the necessary skills, utensils, and (importantly) legal authorization to perform open heart surgery on you, neither does our federal government have the necessary knowhow, resources, and constitutional authorization to be the police/welfare officer of the world. It is costly and dangerous to keep perpetuating this weird belief that it does.
In the beginning of this pamphlet, I noted that we often think a thing to be true without knowing exactly why we believe it to be true. This is a question we also have to ask about our role in world affairs, and it raises some interesting issues: Why should American taxpayers be forced to pay to bomb bridges in another country, then pay to rebuild them, while our own bridges are falling down at home? Why must we send our border patrolmen to Iraq to secure their borders, while our own borders remain wide open to illegals (and possibly terrorists) here at home? Where does our government get the authority to promise the lives and paychecks of future American generations in defense of other countries, when our government can't even live up to the promises it's made to its own retired folks and disabled veterans? Isn't the job of government to protect the life and liberty of those who set it up?
No one doubts that the folks who are running our federal government have only the most humanitarian of intentions in mind when they use and promise American blood and tax dollars to help make the world a better place, but this does not change the fact that it is not their job. Say you are a restaurant owner who hires someone to wait tables. You begin to notice that your customers are increasingly agitated, they are going hungry, and are complaining that they are not getting their money's worth. So, you confront your new waiter, who, apparently, has been spending all of his time on the clock standing outside the restaurant collecting funds for charity, instead of waiting tables inside. This waiter might have the purest of heart and the noblest of intentions, but it doesn't change the fact that that's not what you are paying him to do. Likewise, no where in our Constitution is the federal government given the duty of defending other nations or subsidizing other countries' militaries and social welfare programs. In fact, in our American Constitution, perhaps the most important and the most overlooked amendment in our Bill of Rights is the Tenth Amendment.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." — Amendment X
This states, quite clearly, that any power that the Constitution does not explicitly give to the federal government is reserved to the 50 individual state governments or the people.
If you were to go to a fancy function of some sort, and you saw that a seat was "Reserved for Mr. John Smith," then, unless your name was John Smith, you would not sit at that seat—that seat would be denied to you by virtue of its being reserved for someone else. Why then are we not offended when the federal government takes upon itself roles that are not assigned to it by the Constitution, which the 10th Amendment therefore specifically reserves for the states or the people only?
Read the Constitution for yourself, and see if you can find where the Constitution gives the federal government the power to be the peacekeeper and welfare officer of anyone other than its own people? Our Constitution is one of the shortest and simplest in the modern world, so I can guarantee you it won't take you long to discover that those powers are nowhere given to the federal government, therefore, by command of the 10th Amendment, they are reserved to us, the people, and our state governments, if we should choose to exercise them. We are a long way off from the days when President Andrew Jackson talked about "the necessity of exercising by the General Government those powers only that are clearly delegated [by the Constitution]," but we are not too far off that we cannot still return to this sensible, constitutional policy.
And let's face it, private citizens and private charities have always made much better humanitarians than federal bureaucrats. Research consistently shows that U.S. foreign aid largely goes toward social welfare experiments that only keep the poor and needy dependent on hand-outs. The weapons that we sell (or sometimes give for free) to other countries all too often get shot down by another country who is also using our weapons, and in far too many tragic cases, these weapons sometimes eventually get used against us. And all those countries that we pledge future generations of Americans to defending and protecting? Because we have promised to be the protectorate of so many foreign countries, it's no surprise that we continually find ourselves pledged to fight for two of our allies who decide to go to war with each other. In 1982, we were pledged by the NATO alliance to defend Britain should she ever go to war, and we were also pledged by the Rio Treaty to defend Argentina should she ever go to war. So, obviously, when Britain and Argentina decided to go to war with each other over the Falkland Islands, we found ourselves between a rock and a hard place, and this only made us more resented by both sides.
This is exactly the kind of foreign policy that our Founding Fathers warned us against—that of "entangling alliances." George Washington stated that "it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," and Thomas Jefferson even suggested that our national motto be "Commerce with all nations; alliance with none," believing that "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" is the wisest course of action. James Madison urged us to "maintain sincere neutrality" toward all nations and to exclude ourselves from "foreign intrigues and foreign partialities."
America can (and should) be the most generous and benevolent country in the world, but we can do it far more efficiently, by giving to private aid organizations, joining church sponsored missions groups, or getting involved in cultural and educational exchange programs. There are plenty of ways we can be a humanitarian nation in a much more efficient way, and still abide by the rule of law and our Constitution.
A common retort made against this non-interventionist foreign policy is the accusation of being "isolationist." The fact that this charge is made, however, only shows how far we've strayed from the advice of the Founders and the Constitution they penned. It is a sad state of affairs when people believe that the only way to be involved and accepted in the world is by nosily meddling in the affairs of other governments, having our military spread ridiculously thin across the entire globe, masochistically funneling billions of taxpayer dollars away from our own failing Social Security program to fund the social welfare programs of other countries, and by sacrificing our national sovereignty to the dictates of corrupt, unelected foreign bodies like the United Nations.
Our current foreign policy, which has been continued under both Republican and Democratic, both conservative and liberal, administrations is the height of isolationism. We make ourselves more resented in the world by nosing around where it's not our business, and by making extravagant promises to be the guarantor of all countries and then not being able to deliver. We shun the use of diplomacy in dealing with our enemies, and are afraid to talk to our allies about what we intend to do. We use sanctions and embargoes to forbid our people from trading with any foreign countries that we decide don't live up to our standard. We claim that we want to be a part of international government and have membership in multilateral institutions, and we state that we intend to abide by their dictates, and then when we assert our rightful national sovereignty over the dictates of these international government institutions, it just makes other countries want to have less to do with us.
The message of non-intervention, which is the message of presidential candidate Ron Paul, is the farthest thing from isolationism. The message is: We can talk with, interact with, be friends with, and freely trade with other countries, without having to subsidize foreign militaries and welfare states. We can have a robust military and a strong national defense, without having our troops stretched across 130 countries around the world. We can have open travel, tourism, and exchange programs without leaving our porous borders unsecured. We can be a superpower, a world leader, and a friend to all free countries, and still abide by our Constitution.
