Posted on 01/03/2012 6:56:15 PM PST by Carthego delenda est
"There is a renewed popular interest in the foreign policy approach of America’s Founders. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and nearly a decade after 9/11, many are unsatisfied with U.S. foreign policy and have called for a reappraisal of America’s objectives, means, and national interest. Foreign policy observers from Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations[1] to Congressman Ron Paul[2] have also called for a new paradigm in American foreign policy, one that seeks inspiration and guidance from America’s Founders."
(Excerpt) Read more at heritage.org ...
Speaks for itself.
As a whole there is a vast myth of the US not being involved in global conflicts/interest.
We have a fine job of it.
Do they think Jefferson didn’t send Marines to the “shores of Tripoli”. (That’s just around the corner from Carthage, btw, and I don’t mean Carthage, Miss.)
I understand that isolationism is historically bad. I understand that we have replaced DIRECT intervention with arming/supporting factions because intervention is wrong... but we seem to be @#$@# no matter what we do. I DO think we need to close our borders and stop all immigration that is not for
1) Science/tech/etc people we need...
2)People who would be killed if they can’t move...
Phew. Bookmark for later.
I think Ron Paul’s isolationism is extreme and not in the American tradition.
However, even though we advocate principles based on popular self-government and oppose tyrants in principle, we MUST realize that our own best interests should come FIRST, and that a government such as ours cannot be instituted from without in an environment which has no tradition or history of freedom, democracy or human rights.
THAT is where the Bush type globalists have failed.
It took over a 1000 years of evolution before we got it right. Muslims have demonstrated their religion makes them incapable of even STARTING on that road. The results of our abortive efforts in “nation-building” in Iraq, our continued failure to achieve stability in Afghanistan and the poisonous fruit of the Arab Spring, bare this all out.
As per the essay, such would make you a “non-interventionist”. However, I agree with your immigration thoughts.
Thomas Jefferson: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none."
The words of the Founders themselves strongly suggest that they would take a very dim view of the idea of "international commitments", "worldwide responsibilities" and "global leadership".
America was not meant to be an empire, no free people were ever meant to be the overlords of global empire. I am more in agreement with George Washington than with the mindset shared by Franklin Roosevelt and the Heritage Foundation.
I'm not convinced that Paul's foreign policy is too extreme in the other direction, but when the mainstream has totally abandoned our natural and traditional foreign policy inclinations bequeathed at the first, a place is opened up for extremists like Rep.Paul.
Isolation should not be a dirty word for conservatives.
“we MUST realize that our own best interests should come FIRST”
I agree as did our Founders.
One day it may be us talking about a non interventionist policy with China concerning us. This policy of propping up and tearing down other countries came back to bite us with 9/11 and there is a whole lot of more bad feeling from many different countries that we have screw through out the years.
If anti-filibustering laws like the Boland Amendment weren’t in place, limiting the ability of private Americans to support nascent democratic movements, I could agree. Then it wouldn’t be a problem to claim that the early U.S. supported the export of democracy and it should continue. But these ridiculous laws ARE in place, and because they cannot donate to republican causes worldwide on the basis of American law, the average American doesn’t have interest in or time to study international politics. We all like to think as a result that the U.S. government supports the good guys. All too often, those average Americans are dead wrong. And THAT is why a return to normal American foreign policy would be superior to our current national policy of dangerous liaisons, utilizing our military only as globocrat enforcers instead of defenders of our national sovereignty and security.
Evolution did not give us the beauty of western thought and government...that should be rightly attributed to the Protestant Reformation.
The term “non-interventionist” does not work?
READERS FROM IOWA VOTED IN DRUDGE CAUCUS:
PAUL 33.52%
SANTORUM 21.08%
ROMNEY 20.48%
GINGRICH 10.2%
PERRY 7.28%
Looks like the beginning of the end of the liberal warfare welfare programs, maybe having “model cities” styled foreign Interventionism has seen it’s last days in the sun.
That's a good way to describe the happy medium, a happy medium that our last three presidents have missed pretty badly.
“Looks like the beginning of the end of the liberal warfare welfare programs, maybe having “model cities” styled foreign Interventionism has seen it’s last days in the sun.”
Huh? Are you sure you are on the right forum?
“no free people were ever meant to be the overlords of global empire”
Without intended insult; Duh!
“That’s a good way to describe the happy medium, a happy medium that our last three presidents have missed pretty badly.”
Agreed. FURP
Are you sure you are a real conservative and a not a liberal pretending you understand why being $15-17 trillion in debt protects me and you from the “internationalist muslim threat”, if things are so groovy then why are we bailing out foreign banks with our tax dollars and defending repressive throwbacks in the middle east with our tax dollars, that “war on terror” program sounds like a foreign interventionist “war on poverty”, if it DOES NOT WORK HERE, why does anyone reasonably think it WILL WORK OVER THERE? I have asked this question for over a decade and have yet to be given a rational reasonable conservative answer that did not sound like a liberal talking point to me.
The Reformation was PART of it but not all of it.
Ever hear of Magna Carta? English Common Law?
Constitutions of Clarendon? Provisions of Oxford?
Go back even further. The Ten Commandments? The Decemvirs? Thermopylae? Athenian Democracy??
How about even FURTHER. The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the concept of a nation-state?
The Muslims missed ALL of this. And ALL of it contributed to our concept of western governance.
And our Founding Fathers were aware of ALL of this.
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